Similar beaches and hills existed on the eastern side of the peninsula along the Dardanelles, but it was hardly likely that an enemy would attempt a landing there, since he would come under fire from the Turkish guns in Asia, and so from Liman’s point of view they could be disregarded.
There remained the Asiatic side—the danger that the enemy might come ashore somewhere opposite the islands of Tenedos and Mytilene and make his way north across the plains of Troy towards the Narrows.
It was then, a question of guessing just where the invader was going to strike: at Bulair, where he could cut off the peninsula at the neck, at Suvla and Ari Burnu, half way down, where he could rapidly cross over to the Narrows, at Cape Helles, where his naval guns could dominate the land on three sides, or in Asia, where he had space to manœuvre: or at two or three or all these places?
Liman found that he had six divisions known as the Fifth Army under his command, and at the time of his arrival they were scattered along the coastline in a way which he considered bizarre if not downright dangerous. ‘The enemy on landing,’ he observed, ‘would have found resistance everywhere, but there were no reserves to check a strong and energetic advance. I ordered the divisions to hold their troops together and send only the most indispensable security detachments to the coast.’
It seemed to the new commander that the point of most danger was the Asiatic shore, and he accordingly posted two divisions there to the south and west of Troy—the 11th, and later, the 3rd, which he had trained himself and which was now on its way from Constantinople. Next in priority he placed Bulair, and here two more divisions, the 5th and the 7th, were disposed. A fifth division, the 9th, was sent to Cape Helles. To the sixth and last division, which was now under the command of Mustafa Kemal, there was assigned a special role: it was to remain grouped near Maidos on the Narrows, directly under the commander-in-chief’s orders, and would stand ready to go north to Bulair, south to Cape Helles, or across the straits to Asia, according to where the danger most threatened. Liman knew all about Kemal’s anti-German views, but he regarded him as an efficient and intelligent soldier; and there may even have been some grudging respect for the new commander-in-chief from Kemal’s side. At all events, this mobile assignment suited Kemal admirably.
Liman’s headquarters staff in Gallipoli town was Turkish, but he had, scattered through his divisions, a number of German officers in senior commands; and the German gunners and other technicians remained at the Narrows under a German admiral.
Having placed his forces where he wanted them—and these dispositions have been applauded by almost all experts who have studied them—Liman next got his men into training. They had grown stiff, he says, in their garrisons, and he now instituted a programme of drilling and digging. By day the men marched. By night they came down to the coast and worked on new roads and entrenchments. There was a shortage of every kind of material, and much improvisation was required. Spades and other implements were taken from the peasants, and the soldiers even dug the earth with their bayonets. When the supply of barbed wire gave out they ripped up the fences of the farms; and on the most likely landing places this wire was spread beneath the surface of the water. Land mines were constructed out of torpedo heads.
This work was pressed on with great haste, for there were many signs that the Allied attack would not be much longer delayed. Before the end of March Liman learned that four British officers had arrived in Piræus in Greece, and had there bought for cash forty-two large lighters and five tugs. The British apparently were not very successful in keeping watch on spies in Lemnos and the other Greek islands, for a stream of information about the Allies’ preparations kept reaching Constantinople by way of Egypt and Greece. General Hamilton’s arrival had been reported. It was known that a landing pier had been built in the harbour of Mudros, on Lemnos, and that stores and equipment were being unloaded there. Most of these reports came from the Balkans, but even as far off as Rome German agents were hearing rumours of the coming offensive, and these were duly relayed to the headquarters in Gallipoli. At one time it was said that 50,000 British soldiers had assembled on Imbros and Lemnos. Then the total was increased to 80,000 with 50,000 French in addition. Though confusing, all this intelligence pointed in the same direction: there was not much time left.
Each day, too, there was a good deal of enemy activity which Liman could see with his own eyes. Allied aircraft of a newer, faster pattern had begun to fly over the peninsula on reconnaissance. Like cruising sharks, grey, silent and sinister, the silhouettes of British warships kept ceaselessly moving back and forth far out to sea.
Then in the third week of April there occurred a sudden flurry of activity in the straits themselves.
Shortly after dawn on April 17 Turkish sentries at Kephez Point saw a submarine come to the surface. Apparently it was heading for the Narrows with the intention of passing through to the Sea of Marmara, but suddenly it was caught in a violent eddy and began to drift towards the shore. At once every Turkish gun in the neighbourhood was turned on to the helpless vessel, and as it touched the shore the crew came on deck and were swept into the sea by machine-gun fire. During the next two days and nights an erratic duel took place between the Turks and the British for the abandoned hulk. In turn British submarines, aircraft and warships came rushing into the straits in an attempt to destroy it before the Turks got possession, but their torpedoes went astray, the bombs fell wide, and the warships were driven off by the shore batteries. Finally on the third night a little British patrol boat came sailing straight into the glare of the searchlights and with a lucky shot got one of its torpedoes home.
According to Lewis Einstein, the American Minister in Constantinople, the Turks behaved very well over this incident. When the submarine was first abandoned and the British sailors were struggling in the water the Turkish soldiers on the shore jumped in and rescued them. The dead were first buried on the beach and then taken to the English cemetery at Chanak, where a service was said over them. ‘The Turks are extraordinary in this,’ Einstein wrote. ‘One moment they will murder wantonly, and the next surprise everyone by their kindness. Thus when the first English submarine prisoners were led into the hospital at Chanak, shivering in their wet clothes, the Turkish wounded called them guests, and insisted on their being given everything new, and such few delicacies as they possessed.’
It was only later when the prisoners were sent to filthy prisons in Constantinople that ill-treatment began, but even then in most cases it was the ill-treatment of indifference, of the squalor and callousness of the East rather than an act of deliberate revenge.
Meanwhile another warning had sounded on the Dardanelles. On April 19 a company of Turkish soldiers had made their camp in a fold of the hills on the western side of the peninsula. It was the usual early morning scene: the soldiers asleep on the ground, the smoke of the first cooking fires rising upwards and the lines of horses and mules tethered nearby. Then without warning the terrible searing rush of shells filled the sky and everything was in an uproar of cascading earth and bursting shrapnel. Some thought it was an earthquake and lay still in terror, others ran to the lines of screaming animals and tried to mount and get away, others again who kept their wits went to their guns. But they could see nothing on the flat and deserted sea, nothing but a tiny yellow balloon on the far horizon. It was not until after the campaign that the Turks learned that this was the Manica, the first of the British kite-balloon ships, trying out a new artillery spotting device. While the vessel still lay below the horizon out of sight from the land two observers had gone up in a wicker basket attached to the balloon at the end of a long vertiginous swaying cable, and, with the first light of the morning, had seen through their binoculars the peaceful encampment in the hills. It was an easy matter then for the encampment’s position to be fixed on the map and the news to be telephoned down to the Manica’s bridge below; and it was the shells of the cruiser Bacchante lying unseen still further out at sea that fell, so miraculously, ou
t of the empty sky on to the sleeping Turks.
And then, a day or two later, a heavy British air-raid, the first of the campaign, fell on Maidos at the Narrows. Seven 100-lb. bombs, an unheard-of kind of missile in the Mediterranean at this time, set the town on fire.
After this there was silence again. No more ships attempted to enter the straits and no gun was fired on either side. The weather continued to be unsettled and cold. Among the Turks, who had now been given almost five weeks in which to prepare their defences, nothing remained to be done but to wait—to post their watchers on the hill tops and the cliffs, to keep gazing out to sea by day and sweeping the straits with their searchlights at night. The dread of the coming invasion was everywhere about them; but where it would fall, and at what hour of the day or night, and what it would look like when it came—of all this they had no notion at all.
CHAPTER SIX
‘A voice had become audible, a note had been struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth in arms engaged in this present war, than any other. . . . The voice has been swiftly stilled.’
WINSTON CHURCHILL in a letter to The Times, April 26, 1915.
THERE was a fever of excitement about the ‘Constantinople Expedition’ among young men in England. ‘It’s too wonderful for belief,’ Rupert Brooke wrote as he was setting out. ‘I had not imagined Fate could be so kind. . . . Will Hero’s Tower crumble under the 15-inch guns? Will the sea be polyphloisbic and wine-dark and unvintageable? Shall I loot mosaics from St. Sophia, and Turkish Delight and carpets? Should we be a Turning Point in History? Oh God! I’ve never been quite so happy in my life I think. Never quite so pervasively happy; like a stream flowing entirely to one end. I suddenly realize that the ambition of my life has been—since I was two—to go on a military expedition against Constantinople.’
Rupert Brooke, with his romanticism, his eagerness and his extreme physical beauty, is the symbolic figure in the Gallipoli campaign. One feels that he was destined to be there, that among all these tens of thousands of young men this was the one who was perfectly fitted to express their exuberance, their secret devotion, their ‘half joy of life and half readiness to die’.8
He was just twenty-seven at this time, and the circumstances of his life were almost too good to be true. There had been his lyrical schooldays at Rugby, where he was liked by everybody and where he was in all the teams, and all the literary honours were his. Then Cambridge with the dabblings in socialism, the amateur theatricals, the sittings-up all night, the ramblings through the countryside talking of Oscar Wilde and singing all the way. Like T. E. Lawrence later on he had met and captivated almost everyone who counted in London, from the Asquiths and the Churchills to the Shaws and Henry James. He had travelled everywhere (though always at the end of a thread that tied him to England), and just before the war had been searching for lost Gauguins in Tahiti in the South Pacific. It was Churchill who had obtained for him his commission in the Royal Naval Division which had gone first to Antwerp and was now committed to Gallipoli. More than ever, on the eve of this new adventure, the poet was the hero of Mrs. Cornford’s poem:
A young Apollo, golden-haired,
Stands dreaming on the verge of strife,
Magnificently unprepared
For the long littleness of life.
Brooke’s own war sonnets were soon to be on everybody’s lips:
Now, God be thanked who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping. . . .
Blow out you bugles, over the rich Dead!
If I should die think only this of me;
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
All this—the charmed life, the beauty, the immense promise of his talents—was now to be risked in battle in the classical Ægean. It was indeed almost too wonderful for belief.
As always, Brooke was surrounded by his friends. There was young Arthur Asquith, the Prime Minister’s son; Aubrey Herbert, the orientalist who ‘went to the East by accident as a young man may go to a party, and find his fate there’; others like Charles Lister and Denis Browne who would certainly have been something in the world had they not been about to die. To these, new friends were constantly being added; men like Bernard Freyberg, who was in California when war broke out and came back to England to enlist. He joined the Naval Division.
Soon they were all together in Egypt, living in tents, driving out to the desert to see the pyramids by moonlight, a dedicated group ringed about with its own code and its excitement in the adventure that lay ahead; and they were completely happy. Then Rupert Brooke went down with sunstroke, and the Commander-in-Chief (whom of course he had known in England) called on him in his tent. When Hamilton offered him a place on the headquarters staff Brooke refused; he wanted to be at the landing on Gallipoli with his men.
‘He looked extraordinarily handsome,’ Hamilton wrote in his diary, ‘quite a knightly presence stretched out there on the sand with the only world that counts at his feet.’
Compton Mackenzie in his Gallipoli Memories relates how he too was caught up in the Gallipoli fever. He was living at Capri at the time, had just published Sinister Street (which had made his name), and was working on the concluding chapters of Guy and Pauline. Directly he heard of the expedition he was in a frenzy of impatience to get to Egypt. Friends in Whitehall found him a job on Hamilton’s staff, and presently he was off down the Mediterranean on the first available boat out of Naples, appalled that as yet he had no uniform, and beset with anxiety that he would not arrive in time.
Almost all these young men—and thousands of others less imaginative but just as ardent—were facing the prospect of battle for the first time, and their letters and diaries reveal how strongly the sense of adventure communicated itself through the Army. For the moment the constricting fear of the unknown was overlaid by the newness and the excitement of the occasion, the feeling that they were isolated together here in this remote place and entirely dependent upon one another. They were determined to be brave. They were convinced that they were committed to something which was larger and grander than life itself, perhaps even a kind of purification, a release from the pettiness of things.
‘Once in a generation,’ Hamilton wrote in his diary, ‘a mysterious wish for war passes through the people. Their instinct tells them that there is no other way of progress and of escape from habits that no longer fit them. Whole generations of statesmen will fumble over reforms for a lifetime which are put into full-blooded execution within a week of a declaration of war. There is no other way. Only by intense sufferings can the nations grow, just as a snake once a year must with anguish slough off the once beautiful coat which has now become a strait jacket.’
In the long tradition of British poet-generals Hamilton remains an exception of an extremely elusive kind. One knows everything and nothing about him. Whether one is dealing with the poet or the general at any given point it is almost impossible to tell. Somewhere about this time—April 1915—there was a remarkable photograph taken of the General on board the Triad, and this perhaps reveals him more intimately than all the diaries and the opinions of his friends. One recognizes the other figures in the group at once. Admiral de Robeck stands with his feet firmly planted on the deck, his arms clasped behind his back, and his steady, carved, admiral’s face belongs to gales at sea. Keyes at his side, is exactly as he ought to be: a slim, angular figure, alas not a beautiful face with those big ears, but most engaging. Braithwaite, the Chief of Staff, is the handsome professional; he fills his uniform like a soldier and he knows where he is. But it is upon Hamilton that one inevitably fixes one’s eye. Everything about him is wrong. He has adopted an almost mincing attitude, his shoulders half-turned in embarrassment towards the camera, one hand resting on a stanchion in a curiously feminine way and the other grasping what appears to be a scarf or a piece of material at his side. The fingers are long, shapely
and intensely sensitive, the face quite firm and patrician but somehow nervous and ill-at-ease. His uniform does not fit him—or rather he gives the impression that he ought not to be in uniform at all. His cap is a disaster. Braithwaite has the right kind of cap and it suits him; Hamilton’s perches like a pancake on his head, his tunic is bus-conductorish, his breeches too tight for his wilting bow legs. Physically he is the last possible man one can imagine as a commander-in-chief. He simply does not inspire confidence.
And yet it is clear beyond any doubt from this photograph that here is an exceptionally intelligent man—much more intelligent than any of the others. One looks again and finds oneself hoping that this intelligence, this sensitivity and bird-like quickness, also contains a germ of resolution, perhaps some special sort of refined courage which we had missed before; and still one remains uncertain.
It is left to his record to reassure us. The General was sixty-two when this picture was taken. He was born in the Mediterranean on the island of Corfu, and had spent the whole of his adult life in the Army—indeed, he had seen more active service than almost any other senior general. He had fought the tribesmen on the north-west frontier of India, had served throughout the Boer War, and had been with the Japanese in Manchuria in the Russo-Japanese war. In recent years he had held the appointments of commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean and Inspector-General of Overseas Forces. According to his contemporaries, Hamilton was one of those unusual men who apparently are quite indifferent to danger. His left hand had been shattered early in his career, and more than once he had been recommended for the Victoria Cross.
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