It was extremely savage fighting, for at this early stage neither side had any real idea of what they could or could not do, and consequently both commanders committed everything they had to the battle. Kemal was still convinced that he could drive the Allies into the sea before they had had time to dig in, and Birdwood was still determined to advance against him. Often the Turks charged directly into the Anzac line, and wild hand-to-hand fighting with the bayonet took place in the half-dug trenches. Three days of this went by before it became apparent to the opposing commanders that both their propositions were wrong: the Anzac soldiers could not be dislodged; equally they could not advance. Hardly a thousand square yards of territory had changed hands: and the bridgehead remained there, congested and confined, every part of it swept by fire from the heights above, but apparently immoveable. On the night of April 27, the fighting slackened, and both sides drew off to rest and gather their strength again.
Something of the same sort but on a wider front was happening at Cape Helles in the south. On the day after the landing the village of Sedd-el-Bahr fell, the scattered bridgeheads were joined together and the Turks drew back all along the line. Hamilton judged it to be absolutely vital to take Achi Baba before Liman von Sanders could bring reinforcements down to the toe of the peninsula, and on April 28, with the French on the right and the British on the left, a general forward movement began. It continued inland for a distance of about two miles against increasing opposition, and then came to a halt.
An extreme fatigue had now overtaken the soldiers. Many of them had been without sleep for two or even three nights, and their food, water and ammunition were running out. At Sedd-el-Bahr the River Clyde was firmly anchored to the shore, but the whole of the Allied position was under the fire of Turkish guns from across the straits and from the peninsula itself. The bulk of Hamilton’s forces was now on land, but the beaches still looked like the scene of a gigantic shipwreck with vast piles of stores and military equipment scattered about on every side, and until some order could be got out of this confusion—until the troops were rested and supplied—there was no possibility of renewing the advance. By April 28 all impetus was lost and the firing began to die away along the line.
Thus at the very outset the pattern of the Gallipoli campaign was established: the action, the reaction and the stalemate. The objective is set, the attempt is made, and it falls just short of success. Already Achi Baba had begun to dominate everybody’s mind. It loomed there on the skyline only a mile or two away, but as remote as Constantinople itself. It was not a spectacular hill in any way, for its height was only 709 feet and its sides sloped gently down to the Ægean through a pleasant countryside of olives and cypresses and scattered farms. But Hamilton was determined to take it. Once on the crest he believed that his guns would enfilade the straits as far as the Narrows, and the enemy line in the south would give way. On April 28 his position was particularly frustrating. He knew that time was running out. He saw the hill before him, and given another fresh division—perhaps even a brigade—he knew that he could have it. But there were no fresh divisions or brigades; everything he had was already committed to the battle, and for the time being the men were so worn out, so shocked and undermined by their casualties, that they could do no more. And so he returned to the questions which were destined to be endlessly repeated from this time onwards. Can he ask Kitchener for reinforcements? And even if Kitchener agrees to send them, will they arrive in time?
Even before the expedition had sailed there had been a misunderstanding about this matter of reinforcements. Kitchener’s attitude—and Hamilton was extremely conscious of it—seems to have been that he could spare so much and no more for Gallipoli, and Hamilton had better make the best of it. And so Hamilton’s modest requests had been rebuffed or had remained unanswered. Yet in the end Kitchener had relented. On April 6 he had sent a cable to Sir John Maxwell, the commander of the Egyptian garrison: ‘You should supply any troops in Egypt that can be spared or even selected officers or men that Sir Ian Hamilton may want for Gallipoli. . . . This telegram should be communicated by you to Sir Ian Hamilton.’
Hamilton knew nothing of this. It is one of the mysteries of the campaign that this telegram was never sent on to him, or if it was the copy was lost. And so now on April 28, when all the plans of the first assault had miscarried, when the exhausted army lay stranded just below the crest of Achi Baba, desperately in need of shells and ammunition of every kind, several divisions of fresh men were standing idly by in Egypt.
It was not from Hamilton but from the Admirals that Kitchener had the first news that the situation was becoming critical. On the day after the landing Admiral Guépratte had sent a message saying that reinforcements were needed immediately, and de Robeck had followed this with another signal which made it clear that the Army was in serious difficulties. Churchill and Fisher seized on de Robeck’s message directly it arrived in the Admiralty in London, and they took it across to Kitchener at the War Office. The Field Marshal professed to be a good deal surprised. As far as he knew, he said, things were going well. Hamilton had not made any request for reinforcements. However, he at once instructed Maxwell in Egypt to embark the 42nd Division for the peninsula, together with an Indian Brigade—that same brigade of Gurkhas that Hamilton had pleaded for so unsuccessfully a month before. The French at the same time promised to embark another division at Marseilles.
On hearing this news Hamilton wrote in his diary, ‘Bis dat qui cito dat. O truest proverb! One fresh man on Gallipoli today was worth five afloat on the Mediterranean or fifty loafing around London in the Central Forces. At home they are carefully totting up figures—I know them—and explaining to the P.M. and the Senior Wranglers with some complacency that the 60,000 effective bayonets left me are enough—seeing they are British—to overthrow the Turkish Empire. So they would be if I had that number, or anything like it, for my line of battle. But what are the facts? Exactly one half of my “bayonets” spend the whole night carrying water, ammunition and supplies between the beach and the firing line. The other half of my “bayonets”, those left in the firing line, are up the whole night armed mostly with spades digging desperately into the earth. Now and then there is a hell of a fight, but that is incidental and a relief.’
While the Allies waited for their reinforcements a three days’ lull settled down on the battlefield. The digging went on. On the front line the spring flowers were blooming wonderfully, cornflowers and scarlet poppies, tulips and wild thyme. A storm blew up and for some hours the Army was cut off from the Fleet, its one lifeline to the outer world. But this was the last of the winter; the snow began to melt on Samothrace, and the sea lightened to its marvellous shade of transparent summer blue. On April 30 Hamilton transferred from the Queen Elizabeth to his command ship the Arcadian, and now for the first time his headquarters staff was gathered together. Some five thousand wounded men were sent off in hospital ships to Egypt, and the dead were buried.
Liman von Sanders was also carrying through a rapid reorganization. One of his Asiatic divisions was brought across the Straits in boats to the peninsula, and on April 30 two more divisions were sent down to him by sea from Constantinople. He could now count upon some seventy-five battalions against Hamilton’s fifty-seven, and Enver in Constantinople ordered a full-scale attack at Cape Helles. This was to be a ruthless affair: the soldiers in the first assault were to charge with unloaded rifles so that they would be forced to advance right up to the Allied trenches with the bayonet, and inflammable material was to be carried by the troops to enable them to bum the British boats on the shore. At ten p.m. on May 1, the three days of comparative silence was broken by a Turkish artillery bombardment along the whole length of the line at Cape Helles, and immediately afterwards the enemy infantry came over the top.
There never was any hope for soldiers attacking in such circumstances in 1915, whether in Gallipoli or France or anywhere else, and it is impossible to follow the confused events of the next week withou
t a feeling of despair at the useless waste. For three days the Turks kept it up, and then when they had gained nothing, when their stretcher-bearers came out with the Red Crescent to gather up their wounded and bury the dead, it was Hamilton’s turn.
By May 5 he had got his reinforcements from Egypt, and in addition he took six thousand men from Birdwood and put them into the British line at Cape Helles: a force of 25,000 men in all. Through most of May 6, 7 and 8 the fight went on and with the same heroic desperation as before. ‘Drums and trumpets will sound the charge,’ General d’Amade announced to the French, and out they went in their bright pale-blue uniforms and their white cork helmets, a painfully clear target against the dun-coloured earth. Each day they hoped to get to Achi Baba. Each night when they had gained perhaps 300 yards in one place and nothing in another a new attack was planned for the following day. Elaborate orders were got out by the staff for each new assault, but it often happened that the front-line commanders did not receive these orders until the very early hours of the morning, and only an hour or two before they had to go over the top. Soon, however, it hardly mattered whether the orders were issued or not, for the men were too exhausted to understand them, too bewildered to do anything but get up dumbly once again into the machine-gun fire. A wild unreality intervened between the wishes of the commanders and the conditions of the actual battle on the shore. The battle made its own rules, and it was useless for the generals to order the soldiers to make for this or that objective; there were no objectives except the enemy himself. This was a simple exercise in killing, and in the end all orders were reduced to just one or two very simple propositions: either to attack or to hold on.
In his extremity Hamilton cabled once more to the War Office for more shells to be sent out. The answer came when the fighting was at its height: he was told that the matter would be considered. ‘It is important,’ the message added, ‘to push on.’
By all means Hamilton wished to push on, and he hardly needed a general in the War Office to tell him so, but by the afternoon of May 8 there was no question of his pushing anywhere. At Cape Helles he had lost 6,500 men, which was about a third of the force engaged, and his over-all casualties of British, French and Anzac troops on the two fronts were now over 20,000. Achi Baba, with a field of scarlet poppies on its crest, still stood before him unshaken on the skyline. All his reserves of men had gone. Most of his shells had been shot away. And his two bridgeheads scarcely covered five square miles between them.
Still sailing about in the Arcadian and unable to get his headquarters on shore, the General sent off a message to Kitchener saying he could do no more. ‘If you could only spare me two fresh divisions organized as a corps,’ he wrote, ‘I could push on with great hopes of success both from Cape Helles and Gaba Tepe; otherwise I am afraid we shall degenerate into trench warfare with its resultant slowness.’
It was almost an admission of defeat, and to the sailors in the Fleet who had been mortified at the sight of the Army being cut up on the shore while the warships for the most part stood by watching, motionless in the blue, it was unbearable. Roger Keyes saw a copy of Hamilton’s message soon after it was sent, and he went directly to Admiral de Robeck with a proposal that the Fleet should at once come to the aid of the Army by attacking the Narrows again.
Keyes’ talents as a persuader were given great scope during the Gallipoli campaign, for he was there from the beginning to the end, from the firing of the first shot to the last. He was always for action, always putting forward new ideas, most of which were anathema to Lord Fisher—and indeed, Fisher at this moment was saying in London, ‘Damn the Dardanelles. They will be our grave.’ But Keyes’ energies now rose to their height: he persuaded de Robeck to call a conference of all the senior admirals on board the Queen Elizabeth on May 9. And then, having sat up through the night with Captain Godfrey of the Marines, who was another enthusiast for the naval attack, he placed a new plan before them: the minesweepers and the most powerful battleships to make a direct assault on the Narrows while the older ships remained outside to support and supply the Army. This time there was to be no gradual tentative advance; the attack was to go through in a single day.
There was a curious atmosphere at the conference that gathered in de Robeck’s stateroom on May 9. All the admirals—even de Robeck—were now eager to try again and they more than half believed that they would get through. They accepted the fact that there might be heavy losses, and that half the Fleet might find itself stranded in the Sea of Marmara; nevertheless they wanted to go. De Robeck still hung back somewhat—he said he did not think that the mere appearance of the battleships in the Marmara would necessarily force Liman von Sanders to retire or Constantinople to surrender—but he agreed to put the proposal to the Admiralty. The message that was sent was not a very enthusiastic document; it said in effect, ‘We are quite ready to attack again but if we fail the consequences will be ruinous.’ Yet when the admirals rose from the conference they fully expected that the Admiralty in London would decide to take the risk and order them to go ahead.
Admiral Guépratte was all for it. He had not been summoned to the conference, but, says Keyes, ‘I knew he was of the same mind as I was, and ardently longed to renew the naval offensive; in fact, when I told him my hopes, he said, “Ah, Commodore, that would be immortalité.” He was elated, and at once telegraphed to the Minister of Marine as follows: “A fin d’assister l’Armée dans son action énergique et rude, nous méditons vive action flotte dans détroit avec attaque des forts. Dans ces conditions il me faut mes cuirassés Suffren, Charlemagne, Gaulois dans le plus bref délai possible.” ’
These messages now set the whole issue of the Gallipoli campaign ablaze in London.
On the morning of May 11 Churchill and Fisher met at the Admiralty to discuss de Robeck’s telegram, and Fisher at once made himself clear: he would have no part of any new attempt on the Narrows. Churchill’s position was more complicated. Italy was about to enter the war, and as part of her price for joining the Allies she asked that four British battleships and four cruisers should be placed under her command in the central Mediterranean. Churchill himself had been over to the Continent early in May to conduct the negotiations, and thinking at that time that de Robeck had abandoned all idea of forcing the Dardanelles, he agreed that Italy should have the ships. They were to be taken from the Dardanelles. There was, too, another issue, and it was very urgent: news had been received at the Admiralty that German submarines had reached the Mediterranean and were on their way to the Ægean. De Robeck’s fleet and the precious Queen Elizabeth were stationed in the open sea, and it did not seem practicable for him to undertake a new offensive with this new peril in his wake.
Churchill, however, was in favour of at least a limited advance; he wanted the minefields in the lower straits swept up so that the Fleet would be in a position to go through the Narrows once the Army had won the peninsula. Fisher’s answer to this was that he was opposed to any action whatsoever until the Turkish Army was defeated.
The two men were in the midst of this discussion—perhaps argument is the better word, for they were now drifting steadily apart in their ideas—when news reached them that the battleship Goliath had been sunk in the Dardanelles. It was a brilliant manœuvre on the part of the enemy. In the very early hours of May 12 a Turkish destroyer commanded by a German lieutenant had emerged from the straits and had crept up upon the battleship at her anchorage about 100 yards offshore in Morto Bay. The quartermaster aboard the Goliath hailed the strange vessel through the darkness, and when he got a reply in English no alarm was given. An instant later three torpedoes struck, and the battleship heeled over and sank in two minutes. Although the French soldiers on the coast could plainly hear the cries of the crew as they struggled in the water, more than 500 men were drowned. The Turkish destroyer dashed away up the straits proclaiming her success over her radio.
The Goliath was not an important ship—she was fifteen years old and her tonnage was less than
13,000—yet the very fact that she had been sunk and in such difficult circumstances made the presence of the U-boats seem more menacing than ever. Fisher announced that he must retire the Queen Elizabeth from the Mediterranean at once. Churchill was ready to agree to this: new monitors with anti-torpedo blisters on their sides were ready to sail, and there were other replacements which could be sent to de Robeck. But it was a very different matter with Lord Kitchener. On May 13 Churchill asked him to come to a conference at the Admiralty, and it was there that he was given the news of the withdrawal of the flagship. ‘Lord Kitchener,’ Churchill relates, ‘became extremely angry. . . . Lord Fisher flew into an even greater fury. “The Queen Elizabeth would come home; she would come home at once; she would come home that night or he would walk out of the Admiralty then and there.” ’ Churchill did his best to mollify Kitchener by telling him of the new monitors and the other replacements, and at the breaking up of the meeting Fisher had his way. Orders were sent out recalling the Queen Elizabeth, and at the same time de Robeck was forbidden to renew his attack on the Narrows.
The meeting of the War Council on the following day, May 14, is described by Churchill as ‘sulphurous’. Of all the men who gathered at 10 Downing Street that day only Churchill and Lord Hankey, who was the secretary of the Council, survive. Yet the scene has the contemporary quality which seems to characterize all the crises of the Gallipoli expedition.
Kitchener was very bitter. He had sent an army to Turkey, he said, because he had been assured that the Navy would force the Dardanelles, and because he had been led on by Churchill insisting upon ‘the marvellous potentialities of the Queen Elizabeth’. The Navy had failed, and now the Queen Elizabeth was being taken away at the very moment when the Army was struggling for its life on the edge of the peninsula. It so happened that The Times on this day had come out with its attack upon Asquith’s Government over the shortage of the supply of shells. As he went on to deal with this matter, Kitchener became increasingly gloomy. No organization, he said, could keep pace with the expenditure of ammunition. No one could foresee what would happen. If the Russians cracked in the East it was quite possible that the Germans would bring back their armies to the West and set out upon the invasion of England.
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