Nor is the conduct of the Allied soldiers very easily explained. Certainly they had the expedition feeling; they were young and consequently they believed that they could do anything. Yet very few of Hamilton’s troops had ever come under fire before or had ever killed a man or seen death around them. The midshipmen who took the boats to the shore were hardly more than children, and even the professional French and British soldiers had little conception of the nature of a modern battle, let alone so strange and perilous an operation as this. In the case of the Australians and New Zealanders there was not even a tradition to guide them, for there had been no wars at all in their country’s past. They had no immediate ancestors to live up to—it was simply a matter of proving themselves to themselves, of starting a tradition here and now.
The unknown, which is the real destroyer of courage, pressed more heavily on the Allies than the Turks, for these young men were a long way from their homes, most of them had lived much more protected lives than the Anatolian peasant, and now, at this first experience of war, they were the ones who had to get up into the open and expose themselves while the Turks remained in their safe and familiar trenches. Everything before the Allied soldiers was unknown: the dark sea, the waiting enemy, the very coast itself and all that lay beyond. And it was perhaps not very helpful that General Hunter-Weston should have made a proclamation to the 29th Division before the battle saying, ‘heavy losses by bullets, by shells, by mines and by drowning are to be expected.’ But none of this made any difference.
A wild exuberance seems to have seized upon everybody’s mind. The Australians rush ashore shouting ‘Imshi Yallah’, a phrase they had picked up in more careless days in Cairo. The sixteen-year-old British midshipman, standing up very straight at the tiller, grounds his boat on the sand, cries out some phrase from the football field, and such of his men who are still alive follow him ashore. The French doctor, operating in a ghastly welter of blood, makes a note in his diary, ‘I have sublime stretcher-bearers.’
They probably were sublime, for nearly everyone seems to have been possessed with an inhuman recklessness and selflessness on this day. On one beach alone no fewer than five Victoria Crosses were won within a few hours of the landing.
Still another decoration11 was awarded to Lieut.-Commander Bernard Freyberg in circumstances which, though hardly typical of the fighting, do manage to convey perhaps as well as anything the curiously dedicated courage of the men. Freyberg, who was one of the party who had buried Rupert Brooke on Skyros two days before, came north with the Royal Naval Division, and as part of the pretended landing which was so successful in delaying Liman von Sanders at Bulair he was chosen to lead a boatload of soldiers ashore in the darkness. At the last moment, however, he pointed out that it was unwise to risk the lives of a whole platoon when one man would suffice. Accordingly he had himself taken towards the land in a naval cutter, and when the boat was still two miles from the coast he slipped naked into the icy midnight sea and swam ashore carrying on his back a waterproof canvas bag containing three oil flares and five calcium lights, a knife, a signalling light and a revolver. Reaching the beach after an hour and a half’s hard swimming, he lit his first flare, and then entering the water again swam on for another 300 yards to the east. Landing again he lit another flare and crept into some bushes to await developments. Nothing happened. He then crawled into the Turkish entrenchments, and finding no one about went back to the shore and ignited the third flare.
Freyberg’s chances of being picked up again in the expanse of black water in the bay were not very good, and by now he was suffering from cramp. But he loathed the idea of being made a prisoner of war; and so he went back into the sea and swam out into the darkness. He did not drown. When he was about half a mile from the shore the crew of the cutter caught sight of his brown oil-painted body in the waves. He was hauled on board and restored to life again.
Finally, among all these imponderables there remains the perplexing nature of the battlefield itself. Hamilton naturally made some effort to carry out a reconnaissance of the peninsula beforehand. Some of his senior officers had been taken up the coast in a destroyer to study the beaches and the cliffs, one or two of them had been flown over the scene; and there were Samson’s photographs. But none of these measures succeeded in conveying any real idea of the difficulties of the country, and the maps which were supplied to the officers were incomplete, if not downright inaccurate. In the case of the southern landing around Sedd-el-Bahr at Cape Helles there was at least some guidance to be had from the reports of the marines who had gone ashore during the naval bombardments in February and March. But the Gaba Tepe region, where the Anzac troops were to land, was unmapped and almost wholly unknown. It is still the most savage part of the whole peninsula.
From Chunuk Bair a hopeless maze of scrub-covered ridges drops almost sheer into the sea, and some of the ravines are so precipitous that nothing will grow upon their sides. There is no general He to the land; dried-up watercourses abruptly change direction and end in walls of gravel, each scarred crest leads on to another tangle of hills and formless valleys. Even with a map the eye quickly grows tired; by the very nature of their endless disparity the outlines dissolve and all shapes become one shape like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. There is, too, something unwanted and desolate in this scene; one feels that it has become a wasteland without any purpose or design in nature.
The Turks naturally made no arrangements to defend this part of the coast, since it was inconceivable that an enemy force would land there, or, having landed, would be able to fight in such difficult ground. There is however a good beach just to the south. It runs for a mile or two in a shallow curve to the Gabe Tepe headland, and the country inland is much less broken. Here the Turks posted part of a battalion of infantry. This was not a strong force, but it was well dug in, and from Gaba Tepe the soldiers commanded a fair field of fire along the shore.
It was upon this beach that Hamilton directed his first attack for the conquest of the peninsula, very early on April 25.
Shortly after 2 a.m. three battleships, the Queen12, Prince of Wales and London, reached their sea rendezvous off Gaba Tepe and stopped to lower their boats. The 1500 Australians who were to make the first assault assembled very quietly on deck. They had their last hot drink, and then, with their heavy packs on their backs and their rifles slung on their shoulders, they went down the Jacob’s ladders in the darkness. They sat tightly packed together in the boats, neither smoking nor talking, as they were towed on towards the shore. Presently they could see the dark smudge of the cliffs on the horizon ahead of them, and beyond this, reflected in the sky, the flash of the Turkish searchlights sweeping the Dardanelles on the other side of the peninsula.
At 4 a.m. when they were still 3,000 yards away, the tows were cast off, the black shapes of the battleships slid slowly astern, and a line of pinnaces, their engines sounding unnaturally loud, went on with the boats towards the shore. There was still no sign of life there. Once a signalman cried out, ‘There’s a light on the starboard bow.’ But it proved to be nothing more than a bright star and there was still no sound but the throbbing of the pinnace engines, the slow fall of the sea on the rocks. When they were within two or three hundred yards of the beach the pinnaces in their turn cast off, and the bluejackets took to the oars. The dawn was breaking.
The men had now been in the boats for several hours, their limbs had grown stiff and cramped, and the tension of waiting was becoming unbearable. It was inconceivable that they had not been seen. Suddenly a rocket soared up from the cliffs, and this was instantly followed by a sharp burst of rifle fire. Here finally was the moment for which they had been trained: the men jumped out of the boats and began wading the last fifty yards to the land. A few were hit, a few were dragged down by the weight of their packs and drowned, but the rest stumbled through the water to the beach. A group of Turks was running down the shore towards them. Forming themselves into a rough line and raising their absurd cry of ‘Ims
hi Yallah’ the Dominion soldiers fixed their bayonets and charged. Within a few minutes the enemy before them had dropped their rifles and fled. The Anzac legend had begun.
And now suddenly everything seemed to go wrong. The men had been told that they would find level ground and fairly easy going for the first few hundred yards inland from the beach. Instead of this an unknown cliff reached up before them, and as they hauled themselves upward, clutching at roots and boulders, kicking footholes into the rocks, a heavy fire came down on them from the heights above. Soon the air was filled with shouts and cries. Men kept losing their grip and tumbling down into gullies from which apparently there was no egress. Those who gained the first heights went charging off after the enemy and were quickly lost; and those who followed on behind, not knowing where to go, followed new paths of their own in other directions. Officers lost touch with their men, units became hopelessly mixed up and signals failed altogether.
Sunrise revealed a scene which had never been envisaged in Hamilton’s or anybody’s plans. Over an area of several thousand square yards a dozen isolated skirmishes were going on. Small groups of the Australians had penetrated inland for a mile or more; but most of the others were still pinned to the coast where they stumbled about among the rocks and the prickly scrub of the ravines. It was now apparent to everyone that they had not landed on the Gaba Tepe beach at all. In the darkness an uncharted current had swept the boats about a mile north of the intended landing-place and they were now in the midst of the moon landscape of the Sari Bair range.
The situation was almost as bewildering for the Turks as it was for the Dominion troops. They had made no plans whatever to meet this kind of attack. From the Gaba Tepe headland they still commanded the beach, and they drove back any of the Australians who attempted to come along it, but the small cove at which the boats had chanced to make their landfall was blocked from their field of fire and partly screened by jutting cliffs from the heights above. In the hills themselves there was no properly organized defence at all, and it was largely a matter of how far and how fast the Anzac troops could make their way over the tortuous ground—and in some cases this was very far and fast indeed. By 7 a.m. one young officer and two scouts had succeeded in climbing the first three ridges on the coast, and they were able to look down on the calm waters of the Narrows, only three and a half miles away, the object of the whole offensive. Another party was half way up the dominating peak of Chunuk Bair. By 8 a.m. eight thousand men had come ashore, and although there was great confusion everywhere it was clear that at many places the Turks were on the run. The horrors of the dark and the fear of facing bullets for the first time were now over, and an exuberant relief began to spread through the Anzac troops. The officers set about gathering them together for a more coherent advance.
It was at this point that Mustafa Kemal arrived. We have Kemal’s own account of his actions on this day, and there appears to be no reason to doubt his facts since they are confirmed by other people. Since dawn, he says, he had been standing by with his reserve division at Boghali in the neighbourhood of the Narrows, and it was not until 6.30 a.m. that he received an order to send off one battalion to meet the Anzac attack. The march from Boghali was slow and difficult, for the Turks themselves did not know this ground. Two guides who were sent on ahead got lost, and it was Kemal himself who, with a small compass and map in hand, found a way up to the crest of Sari Bair. From here he looked down and saw the warships and the transports in the sea below, but of the actual battle in the broken hills along the shore he could make out nothing at all. His troops were tired after the long hot march, and he gave orders for them to rest while he himself, accompanied by two or three officers, went forward on foot to get a better view. They had reached the slopes of Chunuk Bair when they saw a party of Turkish soldiers running towards them, evidently in full retreat. Kemal shouted to them to stop and asked them why they were running away. ‘Sir, the enemy.’ The men pointed down the hill, and at that moment a detachment of Australian soldiers emerged through the scrub. Already Kemal was a good deal nearer to them than to his own battalion, and he ordered the frightened soldiers about him to stand and fight. When they protested they had no ammunition he forced them to fix their bayonets and lie down in a line on the ground. Seeing this, the Australians also took cover, and while they hesitated Kemal sent his orderly officer running back to bring up his battalion which was waiting out of sight on the other side of the ridge.
In his report, Kemal remarks cryptically, ‘The moment of time that we gained was this one,’ and he goes on to describe how his battalion came up and drove the Australians from the hill.
It seems possible that Kemal’s astonishing career as a commanding general dates from this moment, for he saw what neither Liman von Sanders nor anybody else had seen—that Chunuk Bair and the Sari Bair ridge had become the key to the whole southern half of the peninsula. Once established on these heights the Allies would dominate the Narrows and direct their artillery fire where they wished for a dozen miles around. Indeed, the whole system of the Turkish defence was based upon the principle that they must hold the hills so that they could overlook the enemy and constantly force him to attack; and these were the most important hills of all. It was not distance that counted on Gallipoli, nor even the number of soldiers or the guns of the Fleet; it was a simple issue of the hills. Later on fifty thousand men were to lose their lives around Chunuk Bair in establishing this fact.
From the Allies’ point of view it was one of the cruellest accidents of the campaign that this one junior Turkish commander of genius should have been at this particular spot at this moment, for otherwise the Australians and New Zealanders might very well have taken Chunuk Bair that morning, and the battle might have been decided then and there.
After the war the Turkish General Staff noted in its history of the campaign: ‘Had the British been able to throw stronger forces ashore at Gaba Tepe either by reinforcing more rapidly those first disembarked, or by landing on a broader front, the initial successful advance of 2,500 yards in depth might have been extended so as to include the ridges overlooking the straits, and a serious, perhaps fatal, blow struck at the heart of the Turkish defences.’
Kemal realized at once that his single battalion was quite inadequate in this situation. He therefore ordered up the whole of his best regiment, the Turkish 57th, and then when heavy fighting developed he committed one of his Arab regiments as well. As a divisional commander he had no authority whatever to do this—these were the only reserves Liman possessed, and their position would have been hopeless if the Allies had planned yet another landing in another place. It was not until the end of the morning, however, that Kemal galloped back to Corps Headquarters and informed Essad Pasha of what he had done. At the same time he asked for permission to throw in the third and last regiment of the 19th Division. The battle had now grown so furious and threatening that Essad had no choice but to agree, and Kemal came back to assume command along the whole Anzac front. He never again left it until the campaign was virtually over.
There is an air of inspired desperation about Kemal’s actions this day, and he even seems to have gone a little berserk at times. Instinctively he must have realized thtat his great chance had come, that he was either going to die here or make his name at last. He was constantly at the extreme front, helping to wheel guns into position, getting up on the skyline among the bullets, sending his men into attacks in which they had very little hope of survival. One of his orders was worded: ‘I don’t order you to attack, I order you to die. In the time which passes until we die other troops and commanders can take our places.’ The soldiers got up from the ground and ran into the rifle and machine-gun fire; and presently the 57th Turkish Regiment was demolished.
It was the most confused of battles, for the Anzac troops were also determined to attack, despite the disorder of their first landing and the mixing up of their units, despite the fact that nowhere could the guns of the Fleet bring them any help in this be
wildering country. There was no front line. The men landing on the beach were as much exposed to the snipers’ bullets as those a mile inland. Advancing up a gully the soldiers would suddenly find themselves in the midst of the Turks, and hand-to-hand fighting with the bayonet began. Ridges were stormed and lost, and then abandoned by both sides. Units fighting side by side lost touch not only with their headquarters but with each other, and there were times when the bullets like cross-currents in the wind seemed to be coming from several different directions at once.
And so all through the midday hours the wild scramble went on and no one could be sure of anything except that the Allies were ashore and building up their reinforcements with every hour that went by.
Meanwhile a battle of a very different kind was being fought by the British at Cape Helles, some thirteen miles away to the south. It will be remembered that the 29th Division (with some additional troops) under Hunter-Weston was to make five separate landings around the toe of the peninsula in the vicinity of the village Sedd-el-Bahr. This was regarded as the spearhead of the whole Allied offensive. Sedd-el-Bahr had been scanned many times from the sea, and it presented a perfect target for the naval guns. To the right of the little cove there was a ruined medieval fortress with a minuscule village behind it. Beside this fortress the land sloped quite gently down to a small gravelly beach no more than 300 yards long and 10 yards wide. Although it was known that this natural amphitheatre had been entrenched and sown with barbed wire it seemed likely that the whole area could be so savaged and cut about by the naval barrage that very little fight would be left in the defenders by the time the first British troops got ashore.
Gallipoli Page 15