Accordingly at 5 a.m. in the uncertain first light of the morning the battleship Albion opened up a tremendous bombardment on the village and the cove. There was no reply from the shore. After an hour it was judged that the Turks there must either be demoralized or dead, and the River Clyde with her two thousand men on board was ordered to the shore. About twenty small boats all filled with men went with her. There was some little delay in the programme, for the current setting down the Dardanelles was much stronger than anyone had guessed, and the launches with the small boats in tow made slow headway against it. At one time the River Clyde got ahead of them and had to be brought back into position.
Thus it was in broad daylight and on the calmest of seas that the soldiers approached the shore. An unnatural stillness had succeeded the barrage. Neither on the beach nor in the fortress nor on the slopes above was there movement of any kind. At 6.22 a.m. the River Clyde grounded her bows without a tremor just below the fortress, and the first of the boats was within a few yards of the shore.
In that instant the Turkish rifle fire burst out. It was a frightful fire, and it was made more shocking by the silence that had preceded it. Far from being demoralized, the Turks had crept back to their trenches as soon as the bombardment was over, and they were now firing from a few yards away into the packed mass of screaming, struggling men in the boats. Some few among the British jumped into the water and got to the shelter of a little bank on the far side of the beach, and there they huddled while the storm of bullets passed over their heads. The others died in the boats just as they stood, crowded shoulder to shoulder, without even the grace of an instant of time to raise their rifles. When all were dead or wounded—the midshipmen and sailors as well as the soldiers—the boats drifted helplessly away. This was the beach on which the Marines had walked in perfect safety two months before.
Many strange scenes occurred because the men persisted in trying to do the things they had been told to do. A sailor from the Lord Nelson, for example, managed to pole his cutter up to the beach, but when he turned to beckon his passengers to the shore he found that they were no longer alive. The boy was observed to be standing there in wonder when he too was struck and his boat slid back into the sea.
Meanwhile Commander Unwin was having difficulty aboard the River Clyde. Her bows were still divided by an expanse of deep water from the shore, and when they tried to bring the steam hopper round to fill the gap it was swept away to port by the current and lay broadside to the beach, where it was useless. It was vital now that the two lighters should be brought round from the stern to make the causeway between the ship and the shore. Unwin left the bridge and dived overboard with a tow rope in his hand. He was at once followed into the water by an able seaman named Williams. Together the two men swam to the shore, and while still standing waistdeep in water and under heavy fire they managed to get the lighters lashed together and placed before the bows. Bracing himself against the current, Unwin held the more landward of the two lighters in position and shouted to the soldiers in the River Clyde to come ashore.
The men at once came running down the gangways along the ship’s sides, and as they ran they presented a target which was not unlike the line of moving objects one sees sometimes in a shooting gallery at a village fair. Having beaten off the smaller boats the Turks were now able to give all their attention to this new assault. They opened up their fire from both sides of the ship, and soon the gangways became jammed with dead and dying. Those of the British who succeeded in reaching the lighters found themselves exposed to an even closer fire, and presently Williams was hit. Not knowing that he was dead, Unwin propped him up in the water and in doing so let go his grip on the lighter. Immediately it was swept away in the current, spilling its cargo of wounded into the sea.
Air Commodore Samson came flying over Sedd-el-Bahr at this moment, and looking down saw that the calm blue sea was ‘absolutely red with blood’ for a distance of fifty yards from the shore, ‘a horrible sight to see.’ Red ripples washed up on the beach, and everywhere the calm surface of the water was whipped up into a ghastly discoloured foam by thousands of falling bullets. The sun was shining brightly.
The British had now reached that point in a battle which is the most terrible of all—the point where the leaders feel they must persist in attacking although all hope has gone. Just for a short time they live in this meaningless and heroic limbo which is at the edge of panic, and which makes a kind of welcome to death. It is a feeling which perhaps the parachutist knows when for the first time he jumps from the aircraft into the sky. The senseless attack had to continue for a little longer until it was sufficiently demonstrated that the thing was impossible, until enough of the general pool of courage had vanished with the dead, and shock and exhaustion had overcome them all. And so they kept pulling the lighters back into position, and the men kept running out of the ship and the Turks kept killing them.
When Commander Unwin collapsed in the water through cold and exhaustion a naval lieutenant and two midshipmen jumped in to take his place. After an hour’s rest aboard the River Clyde Unwin was back in the water again, dressed in a white shirt and flannel trousers (his uniform had been ripped off his back), and there he remained, struggling with the lighters, bringing the wounded off the beach, until again he collapsed and was carried away.
By 9.30 a.m., when the casualties were being numbered in many hundreds, it was becoming apparent to the soldiers at last that they could do no more. Barely two hundred had reached the shelter of the little bank on the beach, and the barbed wire before them was hung with the corpses of the men who had tried to cut a way through to the Turkish trenches. A thousand others remained inside the River Clyde, and they were safe enough there with the bullets hammering on the armoured plates of the ship, but directly they showed themselves at the sallyports the killing began again. Only the machine-guns mounted behind sandbags in the bows of the ship were able to keep firing.
General Hunter-Weston was at sea aboard the cruiser Euryalus all this time, and he knew little or nothing of what was going on. Accordingly he put the next part of the plan into action: Brigadier-General Napier was ordered to the shore with the main body of the troops. The transports steamed slowly forward to the point where they had a rendezvous with the boats which had taken the first assault troops to the shore. Had this meeting ever taken place a massacre of far greater proportions would certainly have occurred. But of the original assault force there remained barely half a dozen boats with living crews. These now came up to the transports and having emptied out their dead and wounded, the sailors stood by to return to the shore. There was room only for Napier, his staff and a few of his soldiers. As they approached the beach, the General was hailed by the men on the River Clyde who wanted to warn him that it was useless to continue. Napier, however, did not understand the situation. He came alongside the lighters, and seeing them filled with men sprang on board to lead them to the shore. But they made no response to his orders and he realized then that they were all dead. From the decks of the River Clyde they called to the General again, ‘You can’t possibly land.’ Napier shouted back, ‘I’ll have a damned good try.’ He tried, but he was dead before he reached the beach.
With this the assault landing at Sedd-el-Bahr came to an end.
Meanwhile the other four landings at Cape Helles had been going forward and with much better success. After heavy fighting near Tekke Burnu, about a mile away to the west, considerable numbers of soldiers were ashore on two beaches there, and towards midday Hunter-Weston began to divert his reinforcements to this point. To the east, in Morto Bay, another force had scrambled up the cliffs with trifling loss at Eski Hissarlik Point, and was securely ensconced. But the commander at Eski Hissarlik had no orders to go to the relief of Sedd-el-Bahr—indeed, he had no knowledge of what was going on there—so he stayed where he was and entrenched.
An even stranger situation had developed at the fifth landing place, a point which had been called ‘Y’ beach, about fou
r miles up the coast on the western side of the peninsula. This landing was Hamilton’s own idea; he had planned to spring a trap on the Turks by getting 2,000 men ashore in this isolated spot. Their mission was to take the Turks in the rear and perhaps even cut them off entirely by marching across the tip of the peninsula and joining up with the other landings in the south. There was no actual beach at this point, but a cleft in the cliffs seemed to offer a fairly easy way up to the heights 200 feet above, and reconnaissance from the sea had revealed that the Turks had established no defences on the shore.13
This enterprise opened with astonishing success. The 2,000 men landed and climbed up the cliffs without a single shot being fired at them. At the top there was no sign of the enemy at all. While their senior officers strolled about through the scrub inspecting the position the men sat down to smoke and brew themselves a cup of morning tea. And so the morning was whiled away. Less than an hour’s march to the south their comrades at Sedd-el-Bahr and Tekke Burnu were being destroyed but they knew nothing of this. They heard the distant sounds of firing through the clear sunlit air, but they made no move in that direction. Had they but known it these troops at Y beach were equal in numbers to the whole of the Turkish forces in the tip of the peninsula that morning; they could have marched forward at will and encircled the entire enemy position. By midday they might have cleared the way to Achi Baba and turned a massacre into a brilliant victory.
It is doubtful however whether the soldiers at Y beach would have acted with very much initiative even if they had known these things, for their operation had been planned in circumstances of the utmost confusion. Two colonels had been landed with the force, and each thought he was in command. No one had bothered to tell Colonel Koe that he was in fact subordinate to Colonel Matthews, and in any case neither of the two men had been given any dear instructions. Both seem to have imagined that, far from exploiting the enemy’s rear, his mission was to stay where he was until the British who had landed in the south came up and made contact, and so all would march forward safely together. Messages were sent off from Y beach to the Euryalus through the day asking for information and instructions, but there was no reply from Hunter-Weston, and neither of the two colonels felt that he could take things into his own hands.
Quite early in the day Hamilton came by in the Queen Elizabeth and saw the peaceful bivouac on Y beach. Roger Keyes begged him to put more troops in there at once: the Royal Naval Division then making a demonstration at Bulair (the demonstration that was deceiving Liman von Sanders), could, he said, be brought down and landed before sunset. But Hamilton felt that he could not give the order without Hunter-Weston’s consent. He sent off a signal to him: ‘Would you like to get some more men ashore on Y beach? If so, trawlers are available.’ To this there was no answer, and the message had to be repeated an hour or two later before Hunter-Weston finally replied: ‘Admiral Wemyss and principal transport officer state that to interfere with present arrangements and try and land men at Y beach would delay disembarkation.’
Thus by midday an extraordinary situation had come about. The main assault of the British in the centre was being held up and was in danger of failing altogether, while two subsidiary forces which were perfectly capable of destroying the whole Turkish garrison of 2,000 men sat by in idleness on either flank. Under the existing system of command there was no immediate way out of this impasse. Hamilton was beginning to understand the position, but he refused to intervene. Hunter-Weston might have put things to rights, but he failed to do so because he did not comprehend what was happening. All his three brigade commanders at Cape Helles had by now become casualties, and two of the colonels who had replaced them had been instantly killed. Therefore there was no senior officer on shore, no tactical headquarters which could rally the men and keep the corps commander informed. It was left to the junior officers and the men themselves to make what shift they could out of whatever resources of courage and discipline remained to them in the bewildering chaos of the battle.
This tragic situation continued throughout the day. The naval gunners yearned to intervene and kept asking the soldiers for targets. But only the most confusing signals came out from the shore, and so for long periods at a stretch the ships were forced to stand helplessly by in the hateful security of the sea. Often the ships were so close that the sailors could see the Turks running about on the shore. Then they fired with a will. But they could not always be certain that they were not firing on their own men. The captains kept asking one another on the wireless, ‘Are any of our troops dressed in blue? Have we landed any cavalry?’
At Sedd-el-Bahr another attempt was made to get the remaining soldiers off the River Clyde at 4 p.m., and this time a few did manage to get to the beach. They were cheered on by the little group who had huddled under the protection of the bank all day. But then the Turkish rifle fire made things impossible again. At 5.30 p.m. the village burst into flames under a new bombardment from the sea, thick smoke rolled over the battlefield and a red glare filled the evening sky. But it was clear that nothing more could be done until night fell. At Tekke Burnu things improved somewhat as more troops came ashore, but there was still no help from either flank: at Eski Hissarlik the British commander still judged himself too weak to make the two-mile march around to Sedd-el-Bahr, and in fact he was expressly forbidden to attempt it. And at Y beach, where the troops had been left undisturbed for eleven hours, retribution had at last begun: the Turks fell upon the bridgehead from the north in the evening light, and finding the British had not bothered to entrench themselves properly, continued the attack all night.
The rest of the Y beach story is brief and bitter, and can be conveniently told here. By dawn the following day there were 700 casualties, and many of the men began to straggle down the cliffs to the shore. Colonel Koe was now dead and in the absence of any clear authority a panic began. Frantic messages asking for boats were sent out to the Navy, and the Navy, believing that an evacuation had been ordered, began to take the men off. Colonel Matthews with the rest of his force on the cliff above knew nothing of all this. He fought on. At 7 a.m. he drove off a heavy Turkish attack with the bayonet, and in the lull that followed he made a tour of his position. He then discovered for the first time that a whole section of his line had been abandoned. His position was now so insecure that he felt he had no choice but to acquiesce in the retirement, and a general evacuation began. At this very moment the Turks, on their side, decided that they had been beaten, and they too withdrew; and so the British came off Y beach in the same way as they had arrived, without another casualty, without the sound of a shot being fired. In the afternoon of April 26 Roger Keyes’s brother, Lieutenant-Commander Adrian Keyes, went ashore in a boat to look for wounded men who might have been left behind. He climbed the cliff and walked about for an hour among the abandoned British equipment. No one answered his calls. A perfect silence had settled on the air and the battlefield was empty.
All this, of course, was unknown and unguessed at on the other parts of the Cape Helles front as night at last began to fall on April 25. The night was the friend of the attackers. Little by little the Turkish fire began to slacken, and the aim of their gunners became uncertain. At Sedd-el-Bahr the men under the bank on the beach were able to put up their heads at last. Tentatively at first, and then with growing confidence, they crept out of their hiding-places to clear away the dead from the lighters and gather up the wounded from the beach. As the night advanced all the remaining men on the River Clyde were brought off without a single casualty. Everywhere along the line a furtive movement began under the cover of the darkness. Men crawled through the scrub to safer positions, and dug themselves entrenchments in the rocky ground. Others went forward to the barbed wire which had held them up all day and cut pathways through it. From out at sea the naval guns opened up again, and boats filled with fresh troops and stores of food and water began to reach the shore. Midshipmen and even the captains of ships took a hand in carrying boxes of ammunition up th
e cliffs.
By midnight the British no doubt might have gone forward again and perhaps overwhelmed the Turks in the tip of the peninsula. But there was still no senior officer ashore who was able to give them a lead. It was feared that an enemy counter-attack might start at any moment, and no one as yet had the slightest notion that they now outnumbered the enemy in Cape Helles by six to one. A dullness, a kind of mental paralysis, had followed the shock of the violent battles of the day, the unknown still loomed before them in the darkness.
The Turks in fact were in no position even to consider a counter-attack. Of their original 2,000 men who opposed the five Cape Helles landings half were casualties. A Turkish message captured on the following day gives an idea of their condition in the frontline trenches. ‘Captain,’ it runs, ‘you must either send up reinforcements and drive the enemy into the sea or let us evacuate this place because it is absolutely certain that they will land more troops tonight. Send the doctors to carry off my wounded. Alas alas, Captain, for God’s sake send me reinforcements because hundreds of soldiers are landing. Hurry. What on earth will happen, Captain?’
Nothing happened. Fusillades of shots broke out and died away. Men fired at shadows. A light rain began to fall. Confused, exhausted, isolated in the small circle of their own experiences, the soldiers waited for the morning.
Hamilton on board the Queen Elizabeth made a 5,000-word entry in his diary that night. In the course of it he wrote: ‘Should the Fates so decree, the whole brave Army may disappear during the night more dreadfully than that of Sennacherib; but assuredly they will not surrender; where so much is dark, where many are discouraged, in this knowledge I feel both light and joy. Here I write—think—have my being. Tomorrow night where shall we be? Well; what then; what of the worst? At least we shall have lived, acted, dared. We are half way through—we shall not look back.’
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