Fisher’s only comment on all this was that he had been against the Dardanelles adventure since the beginning, and this, he said, Lord Kitchener knew perfectly well. Everyone now seems to have been in an angry and despondent mood, and they listened without much patience as Churchill argued that the success of the campaign had never depended upon the Queen Elizabeth. The only thing to do now, he said, was to reinforce Hamilton, push the campaign through to a conclusion and forget their vague fears about the invasion of England. But with his First Sea Lord openly antagonistic to him Churchill was not in a strong position, and the meeting broke up without any decision being reached.
The crisis now moved quietly, almost stealthily, to its climax. In the afternoon there was a quite amicable meeting between Fisher and Churchill on the subject of the replacements that were to be sent to de Robeck. The list of ships was agreed, and Fisher went off to bed. Late that night Churchill went through the list again and decided to add two E-class submarines to it. His minute on the subject was sent off in the usual way to Fisher’s office, so that the Admiral would see it on his desk when he arrived first thing on the following morning. Upon this the explosion erupted. Fisher appears to have reached his office about 5 a.m. on May 15, and on seeing Churchill’s minute immediately decided to resign. The two submarines were, apparently, the last straw. ‘First Lord,’ he wrote, ‘After further anxious reflection I have come to the regretted conclusion I am unable to remain any longer as your colleague. It is undesirable in the public interests to go into details—Jowett said “never explain”—but I find it increasingly difficult to adjust myself to the increasing daily requirements of the Dardanelles to meet your views—as you truly said yesterday I am in the position of continually veto-ing your proposals.
‘This is not fair to you besides being extremely distasteful to me.
‘I am off to Scotland at once to avoid all questionings.
Yours truly,
Fisher.’
Churchill received this letter from his secretary as he was walking across the Horse Guards Parade later in the morning, and he did not take a serious view of the matter since Fisher had resigned or threatened to resign so many times before. The Admiral, however, was nowhere to be found, and Churchill went across to Downing Street to discuss the matter with the Prime Minister. Asquith’s first move was to write out an order to Fisher commanding him to return to his duty in the name of the King, and secretaries were sent out to scour the town until they found him. Some went to the main railway stations, others hunted through the Admiralty. Several hours elapsed, however, before the Admiral was found in a room in the Charing Cross hotel, and for a time he refused to come out. In the end he agreed that he would at least see the Prime Minister.
Lloyd George was in the entrance lobby of 10 Downing Street when Fisher arrived for this interview. ‘A combative grimness,’ Lloyd George says, ‘had taken the place of his usual genial greeting; the lower lip of his set mouth thrust forward, and the droop at the corner was more marked than usual. His curiously oriental features were more than ever those of a graven image in an eastern temple, with a sinister frown. “I have resigned,” was his greeting, and on my inquiring the reason he replied, “I can stand it no longer.” He then informed me that he was on his way to see the Prime Minister, having made up his mind to take no further part in the Dardanelles “foolishness”, and was off to Scotland that night.’
Fisher clearly was in a rage to have done with the formalities, and neither Asquith nor Churchill could move him.
In a last message to Churchill—and one can almost see the pen trembling in the Admiral’s hand—he wrote: ‘YOU ARE BENT ON FORCING THE DARDANELLES AND NOTHING WILL TURN YOU FROM IT—NOTHING. I know you so well . . . You will remain and I SHALL GO—it is better so.’ There followed his defiant final ultimatum to Asquith demanding, as a condition of his return, absolute control over the Navy and the removal of Churchill and all others who, he imagined, stood in his way. It was absurd, of course, even crazy, and it meant that the old man had to be removed from the scene as quickly as possible. A curt note from Asquith accepting his resignation ended his career.
In more ordinary times Churchill perhaps might have weathered Fisher’s departure, but too much was happening too quickly. The shell crisis alone was enough to bring the Government down, or at any rate to lead to its reorganization. In some vague way it had begun to seem that the Gallipoli campaign was responsible for all their troubles, and Churchill was regarded as the original author of it. He had urged it from the beginning. He had lost the ships. He was responsible for the disasters and delays in the Army’s landing. He was the amateur who had dared to fly in the face of the expert opinion of the Admirals—even Fisher, the greatest of them all. All this was wildly unfair. ‘It (Churchill’s removal from the Admiralty) was a cruel and unjust degradation,’ Lloyd George wrote. ‘The Dardanelles failure was due not so much to Mr. Churchill’s precipitancy as to Lord Kitchener’s and Mr. Asquith’s procrastination.’
Directly they had word of Fisher’s resignation Bonar Law and the Opposition leaders gave notice to Asquith that they would challenge the Government on the matter in the House of Commons, and Asquith at once entered into negotiations for a coalition. In the confused dealings of the next few days Churchill had no part at all; for a time his friends put up a show of a fight for him, but the Conservatives were absolutely determined to have him out. The new cabinet was finally announced on May 26. Balfour was to have the Admiralty with Sir Henry Jackson as his First Sea Lord. Jackson was almost as much an opponent of the Dardanelles as Fisher had been, and he later declared that he thought the forcing of the straits to be ‘a mad thing to do’. Churchill declined the Colonial Office, and there was some discussion about his taking over a command in the Army in France, but in the end he was given the minor office of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. It was by some way his heaviest fall in politics since he had first entered the House of Commons fifteen years before. However, he was given a seat in the newly-formed Dardanelles Committee, and although he had no power to take decisions it was understood that he was to have a watching brief on the operations at Gallipoli. On May 26 he left the Admiralty, and he did not return there until twenty-four years later at the outbreak of the second world war.
Ashmead-Bartlett, who returned home from the peninsula for a few days about this time, gives a vivid picture of Churchill and his state of mind. ‘I am much surprised,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘at the change in Winston Churchill. He looks years older, his face is pale, he seems very depressed and to feel keenly his retirement from the Admiralty. . . . At dinner the conversation was more or less general, nothing was said about the Dardanelles, and Winston was very quiet. It was only towards the very end that he suddenly burst forth into a tremendous discourse on the Expedition and what might have been, addressed directly across the table in the form of a lecture to his mother, who listened most attentively. Winston seemed unconscious of the limited number of his audience, and continued quite heedless of those around him. He insisted over and over again that the battle of March 18th had never been fought to a finish, and, had it been, the Fleet must have got through the Narrows. This is the great obsession of his mind, and will ever remain so. . . .’
Of these events little or nothing was known at Gallipoli. From day to day Hamilton waited for an answer to his message to Kitchener asking for the reinforcement of another Army corps. But nothing came beyond a promise of one Lowland division which was to sail from England. There was, however, an echo of the hesitation and the confusion in Whitehall in a cable which Hamilton received from Kitchener on May 19. In it Kitchener spoke of his disappointment at the progress at Gallipoli. ‘A serious situation,’ he said, ‘is created by the present check, and the calls for large reinforcements and an additional amount of ammunition that we can ill spare from France.
‘From the standpoint of an early solution of our difficulties, your views, as stated, are not encouraging. The question whether we can long
support two fields of operation draining on our resources requires grave consideration. I know that I can rely on you to do your utmost to bring the present unfortunate state of affairs in the Dardanelles to as early a conclusion as possible, so that any consideration of a withdrawal, with all its dangers in the East, may be prevented from entering the field of possible solutions.
‘When all the above is taken into consideration, I am somewhat surprised to see that the 4,500 which Maxwell can send you are apparently not required by you. With the aid of these I had hoped that you would have been in a position to press forward.’
Hamilton wrote in his diary: ‘I can only surmise that my request made to Maxwell that these 4,500 men should come to me as drafts for my skeleton units, instead of as a raw brigade, has twisted itself going down some official corridor into a story that I don’t want the men! K. tells me Egypt is mine and the fatness thereof; yet no sooner do I make the most modest suggestion concerning anything or anyone Egyptian than K. is got at and I find he is the Barmecide and I Schac’abac.16 “How do you like your lentil soup?” says K. “Excellently well,” say I, “but devil a drop is in the plate!” I have got to enter the joke; that’s the long and short of it.”
There is a revealing quality about this grotesque little incident, for it was symptomatic of the general tug-of-war in which they were all engaged: Maxwell withholding troops from Hamilton, Fisher withholding ships from Churchill, the Conservatives withholding political support from Asquith. The setback at Gallipoli, in short, had brought out into the open, and more bitterly than ever, the great issue which in the end was to dominate all others before the end of the year: were they to fight in the East or the West?
Meanwhile on the peninsula the Army’s store of ammunition had fallen so low that the guns were rationed to two shells a day. On the two fronts at Anzac and Cape Helles there was desultory fighting from time to time, but hardly more than a few yards of ground changed hands, and it seemed now that nothing could break the deadlock. Yet the situation could not remain as it was, some sort of decision would have to be taken. And, in fact, at this ultimate moment of hesitation, a glimpse of reality was on its way. A few moments before dawn, on this same day, May 19, General Birdwood was woken in his dugout at Anzac with the news that, in a packed mass of many thousands, the Turks were streaming across to his trenches in the darkness.
CHAPTER NINE
THERE is some dispute as to who ordered the attack on the Anzac bridgehead on the night of May 18. Liman von Sanders says that he himself made the plan and he takes the responsibility for it; others believe that it was conceived by Enver when he first visited the peninsula on May 10, and the circumstances of the enterprise do, in fact, bear the impress of Enver’s headlong cast of mind. There was no subtlety or caution about the matter: some 42,000 men under the command of Essad Pasha were assembled, and their orders were nothing less than to demolish the whole Anzac bridgehead at a single blow. By nightfall it was hoped that the last Dominion soldier would have been killed, captured or driven into the sea, and that the entire Turkish army would have then been free to turn south to deal with the remainder of Hamilton’s forces at Cape Helles.
At this time the Australian and New Zealand Corps had dwindled to some 10,000 effective men, and it was only by luck that a brigade which had been sent round to Cape Helles earlier in the month was returned to Birdwood on the eve of the battle. This brought his numbers to a total of about 17,000, of which 12,500 were available for fighting in the front line. They were thus outnumbered by more than three to one.
The Anzac position had by now become very clearly defined: it was a shallow triangle, covering about 400 acres, its base, a mile and a half long, resting on the sea, its apex reaching to the slopes of Sari Bair about a thousand yards from the shore. In order to avoid the fire of the British Fleet the Turks had dug their trenches almost on top of the Anzac lines, and at some places the two sides were divided by not more than ten yards. The situation at Quinn’s and Courtnay’s Posts in the centre of the line was fantastic; directly behind the Australian trench (which was kept packed with men by day and night), a steep cliff fell away to the gully below, and the Turks had only to make an advance of five yards in order to drive a wedge through the bridgehead to the sea. But this they never could succeed in doing, though they attacked repeatedly during the first half of May. No-man’s-land at these and other points was no larger than a small room, and it was the easiest thing in the world for the Turks to toss a hand grenade into the Anzac trenches. The only real defence against this was to throw the grenade smartly back again before it exploded; except for a few jam tins which were filled with explosive at a makeshift workshop on the beach, the Australians had no such weapons of their own. No man could expose the smallest fraction of his body for an instant without being shot, and even a periscope hoisted for a moment above the parapet was immediately shattered. An extreme tension prevailed in the bridgehead; there was no hour when some new raid was not expected or delivered, no minute when shells were not crashing among them or bullets screaming overhead. The soldiers managed to sleep through this racket at odd hours of the day and night, but it was never a sufficient rest. No one was ever safe. On May 14 General Bridges, the commander of the Australian Division, was mortally wounded, and the following day Birdwood had his hair parted by a bullet while he was looking through a periscope. The wound turned septic and was very painful but he continued in command.
There was an intense hatred of the Turks among the Dominion soldiers. Most of them had grown up in a world of clear and obvious values; a fight was a fight, you knew who your enemy was and you stood up to him and had it out, fairly and squarely, in the open. It was in this spirit that they had volunteered for service in the Army. The charge was the thing, the quick and palpable blow in the face that knocked the man down. War, in fact, was an extension of the pub brawl, and it had in it the elements of rioting, of street fighting, of instant physical revenge.
But nothing of the kind had happened at Gallipoli. From the day they had landed the soldiers had scarcely ever seen the enemy; he lurked unseen in the heights above, he sniped down on them and caught them unawares, he stood back at a safe distance with his guns and burst his shrapnel above their heads, and there seemed to be no effective way of retaliating. After more than three weeks of this the soldiers were beginning to feel an increasing sense of frustration and of impotent anger in their narrow bridgehead. A claustrophobia had developed; they felt that they had been caught in a trap, and there seemed to be something unfair in this kind of fighting in which they were never given a chance of showing their real courage and their strength.
Beyond this there was at this early stage another and perhaps deeper feeling that there was a monstrosity and inhumanity about the Turks: they were cruel and sinister fanatics, capable of any sort of vice and bestiality—in brief, it was the popular picture that had been drawn of them by Byron and the emotions of Gladstonian liberal England. The Turks were ‘natives’—but natives of a peculiarly dangerous and subtle kind. And so the Australian and New Zealand soldiers fought, not an ordinary man, but a monster prefigured by imagination and by propaganda; and they hated him.
Despite these things, perhaps even because of them, an extraordinary cheerfulness and exaltation possessed the men in the front line. Living with the instant prospect of death, all pettiness, all the normal anxieties and jealousies of life, deserted them, and they developed an almost mystical feeling towards the extreme danger that surrounded them. The fighting became an elaborate and exciting game in which they were all immensely engrossed, and it was only when they were retired to rest for a while in some half-haven under the cliffs that they became aware again of the miseries of their situation, the monotonous food, the endless physical discomfort, the impossible limits of a life in which even a canteen of fresh water or a bathe in the sea were the utmost luxuries.
By now death had become a familiar, and they often talked about it in a half-derisive deprecating slang. In the
same way as the Chinese will laugh at other people’s pain it became a huge joke when the men bathing off the beach were caught in a burst of shrapnel, or when some poor devil had his head blown off while he was in the latrine. There had to be some sort of expression which would help to rationalize the unbearable circumstances of their lives, some way of obtaining relief from the shock of it all, and since tears were impossible this callous hard-boiled laughter became the thing. They were not fatalists. They believed that a mistake had been made in the landing at Gaba Tepe and that they might easily have to pay for it with their lives; but they very much wanted to go on living, they were all for the battle and they hoped and believed obscurely that in the end they would win.
These high spirits, this fineness and integrity created by the powerful drug of risk, might not perhaps have continued indefinitely under such a strain, but there had certainly been no weakening in morale when, on May 18, the soldiers became aware that something unusual was happening in the enemy lines.
An unaccountable silence spread through the hills before them. For the first time since they had landed the fearful racket of the Turkish howitzers died away, and for several minutes at a stretch no rifle or machine-gun was fired. In this strange quiet most of the day went by. Then at five o’clock in the evening a tremendous artillery barrage broke out, and it continued for about half an hour. It chanced that on this day a naval aircraft had been sent out to fix the position of an enemy warship in the straits, and on his return the pilot reported that he had seen large numbers of men massing behind the Turkish lines. Later in the day this information was confirmed by a second pilot who had also seen enemy soldiers coming across the straits in boats from the Asiatic side; and from the battleship Triumph there was a further report that Turkish reinforcements were marching north from Cape Helles to the Anzac front. On hearing this, Birdwood sent a message to his two divisional commanders warning them to expect an attack that night; the men were to stand to arms at 3 a.m., which was half an hour before the usual time.
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