‘The impression which that scene from the ridge by Quinn’s Post made on my mind has obliterated all the rest of the time at Anzac. I cannot recall a single incident on the way back down the valley. I know only that nothing could cleanse the smell of death from the nostrils for a fortnight afterwards. There was no herb so aromatic but it reeked of carrion, not thyme nor lavender, nor even rosemary.’
By three in the afternoon the work was practically done. There were two crises: it was discovered at the last minute that the Turks’ watches were eight minutes ahead of the British, and a hurried adjustment had to be made. Then, as the hour for the ending of the truce was approaching, a shot rang out. Standing there in the open with tens of thousands of rifles pointed towards them the burial parties stood in a sudden hush, but nothing followed and they returned to their work again.
At four o’clock the Turks near Quinn’s Post came to Herbert for their final orders, since none of their own officers were about. He first sent back the grave-diggers to their own trenches, and at seven minutes past four retired the men who were carrying the white flags. He then walked over to the Turkish trenches to say good-bye. When he remarked to the enemy soldiers there that they would probably shoot him on the following day, they answered in a horrified chorus, ‘God forbid.’ Seeing Herbert standing there, groups of Australians came up to the Turks to shake hands and say good-bye. ‘Good-bye, old chap; good luck.’ The Turks answered with one of their proverbs: ‘Smiling may you go and smiling may you come again.’
All the remaining men in the open were now sent back to their lines, and Herbert made a last minute inspection along the front, reminding the Turks that firing was not to begin again for a further twenty-five minutes. He was answered with salaams, and he too finally dropped out of sight. At 4.45 p.m. a Turkish sniper fired from somewhere in the hills. Immediately the Australians answered and the roar of high explosive closed over the battlefield again.
There had been some irregularities. On both sides a good deal of surreptitious digging had been done, and both Turkish and British staff officers had strolled about no-man’s-land, covertly studying the lie of each other’s trenches. It was even said—and the story has never been denied in Turkey—that Kemal had disguised himself as a sergeant and had spent the whole nine hours with various burial parties close to the Anzac trenches.
Much the most important result of the battle and the truce, however, was that from this time onwards all real rancour against the Turks died out in the Anzac ranks. They now knew the enemy from their own experience, and he had ceased to be a propaganda figure. He was no longer a coward, a fanatic or a monster. He was a normal man and they thought him very brave.
This camaraderie with the enemy—the mutual respect of men who are committed to killing one another—was not peculiar to Gallipoli for it existed also in France; but on this isolated battlefield it had a special intensity. The Australian and New Zealand troops refused to use the gas-masks that were now issued to them. When they were questioned about this they made some such reply as, ‘The Turks won’t use gas. They’re clean fighters.’18
Had the soldiers known Enver a little better they might not have been so certain of this; yet perhaps they did know Enver, for politicians generally were held in contempt at Gallipoli and by both sides, and in a way that seldom occurred in the second world war. Soon many of the British began to feel as Herbert felt: that the campaign need never have been fought at all had only the politicians acted more responsibly in the beginning.
The extreme ferocity with which the battles were fought at Gallipoli gives no inkling of the compassion that the opposing soldiers in the front line felt for one another. In the periods of comparative calm which followed May 19 at Anzac, the most bizarre incidents occurred. Once a staff officer visiting the front saw with astonishment that a number of Turks were walking about behind their lines in full view of the Australians. He asked, ‘Why don’t you shoot?’ and was answered, ‘Well, they’re not doing any harm are they? Might as well leave the poor beggars alone.’ Later in the campaign there was an old Turk who apparently had been given the job of doing the washing for his platoon. Regularly each day he emerged from his trench and hung out the wet shirts and socks in a line along the parapet, and no Allied soldier would have dreamed of shooting him. The Turks on their side usually withheld their fire from the survivors of wrecked ships, and in the front line at least their prisoners were treated with kindness.
There was a constant traffic of gifts in the trenches, the Turks throwing over grapes and sweets, the Allied soldiers responding with tinned food and cigarettes. The Turks had no great love for British beef. A note came over one day: ‘Bully beef—non. Envoyez milk.’ It became an accepted practice to wave a ‘wash-out’ to a sniper who missed: there would be the sudden crack of a rifle, the bullet screaming past the Turk’s head, then the laugh from the enemy trench, the waving of a spade or a bayonet and the words in English softly shouted, ‘Better luck next time, Tommy.’
Once or twice private duels were fought. While the rest of the soldiers on both sides held their fire an Australian and a Turk would stand up on the parapets and blaze away at one another until one or the other was wounded or killed, and something seemed to be proved—their skill, their wish ‘to dare’, perhaps most of all their pride. Then in a moment all would dissolve into the horror and frenzy of a raid or a setpiece battle, the inhuman berserk killing.
Between the two extremes, between the battles and the truce, between fighting and death, the men had to come to terms with their precarious existence. They soon developed habits that fitted their mad surroundings, and they did this very rapidly and very well. The rabbit warren of trenches and dugouts at Anzac became more familiar to them than their own villages and homes. By night ten thousand shaded fires were lit in niches in the cliffs, ten thousand crude meals were cooked; they slept, they waited for their precious mail, their one reminder of the lost sane world, they put the individual extra touch to their dug-outs—another shelf in the rock, a blanket across the opening, a biscuit tin to hold a tattered book. They knew every twist in the paths where a sniper’s bullet would come thudding in, they accepted wounding as they might have accepted an accident on the football field, they argued about the war and the confined beehive politics of their battalions, they took the risk of bathing in the sea under the bursting shrapnel and nothing would stop them doing it. They cursed and complained and dreamed and this in fact was home.
No stranger visiting the Anzac bridgehead ever failed to be moved and stimulated by it. It was a thing so wildly out of life, so dangerous, so high-spirited, such a grotesque and theatrical setting and yet reduced to such a calm and almost matter-of-fact routine. The heart missed a beat when one approached the ramshackle jetty on the beach, for the Turkish shells were constantly falling there, and it hardly seemed that anyone could survive. Yet once ashore a curious sense of heightened living supervened. No matter how hideous the noise, the men moved about apparently oblivious of it all, and with a trained and steady air as though they had lived there all their lives; and this in itself was a reassurance to everyone who came ashore. The general aspect was of a vast mining camp in some savage desert valley. Close to the shore were die dug-outs of the generals, the wireless station, the telephone exchange, the searchlights, a factory for making bombs, a corral for Turkish prisoners, a smithy. Scores of placid mules sheltered in the gully until at nightfall they began their work of taking ammunition and supplies to the men in the trenches in the hills above—the water ration was a pannikin a day. There was a smoking incinerator near the jetty, and it erupted loudly whenever an unexploded bullet fell into the flames. An empty shellcase served as a gong for the headquarters officers’ mess. They ate bully beef, biscuits, plum and apple jam, and just occasionally frozen meat; never vegetables, eggs, milk or fruit.
Above the beach a maze of goat tracks spread upward through the furze and the last surviving patches of prickly oak, and at every step of the way some soldier had
made his shelter in the side of the ravine: a hole dug into the ground, the branches of trees or perhaps a piece of canvas for a roof, a blanket, a few tins and boxes, and that was all. As one progressed upward there were many crude notices of warning against the enemy snipers: Keep Well to Your Left. Keep Your Head Down. Double Across One at a Time. Then finally the trenches themselves, where all day long the men stood to their arms, watching and watching through their periscopes for the slightest movement in the enemy lines. Cigarettes dangled from their mouths. They talked quietly.
Hamilton came over to the bridgehead on May 30 and saw, ‘Men staggering under huge sides of frozen beef: men struggling up cliffs with kerosene tins full of water; men digging; men cooking; men cardplaying in small dens scooped out from the banks of yellow clay—everyone wore a Bank Holiday air; evidently the ranklings and worries of mankind—miseries and concerns of the spirit—had fled the precincts of this valley. The Boss—the bill—the girl—envy, malice, hunger, hatred—had scooted away to the Antipodes. All the time, overhead, the shell and rifle bullets groaned and whined, touching just the same note of violent energy as was in evidence everywhere else. To understand that awful din, raise the eyes twenty-five degrees to the top of the cliff which closes in the tail end of the valley and you can see the Turkish hand-grenades bursting along the crest, just where an occasional bayonet flashes and figures hardly distinguishable from Mother Earth crouch in an irregular line. Or else they rise to fire and are silhouetted against the sky and then you recognize the naked athletes from the Antipodes and your heart goes into your mouth as a whole bunch of them dart forward suddenly, and as suddenly disappear. And the bomb shower stops dead—for the moment; but, all the time, from that fiery crest line which is Quinn’s, there comes a slow constant trickle of wounded—some dragging themselves painfully along; others being carried along on stretchers. Bomb wounds all; a ceaseless silent stream of bandages and blood. Yet three out of four of “the boys” have grit left for a gay smile or a cheery little nod to their comrades, waiting for their turn as they pass, pass, pass, down on their way to the sea.
‘There are poets and writers who see naught in war but carrion, filth, savagery and horror. The heroism of the rank and file makes no appeal. They refuse war the credit of being the only exercise in devotion on the large scale existing in this world. The superb moral victory over death leaves them cold. Each one to his taste. To me this is no valley of death—it is a valley brim full of life at its highest power. Men live through more in five minutes on that crest than they do in five years of Bendigo or Ballarat. Ask the brothers of these very fighters—Calgoorlie or Coolgardie miners—to do one quarter of the work and to run one hundredth the risk on a wages basis—instanter there would be a riot. But here—not a murmur, not a question; only a radiant force of camaraderie in action.’
From May onwards many of the men discarded their uniforms, and except for a pair of shorts, boots and perhaps a cap, went naked in the sun. Even in the frontlines they fought stripped to the waist, a girl, a ship or a dragon tattooed on their arms.
There was a toughness mixed with touchiness in this ant-heap life. Compton Mackenzie relates that on his visit to Anzac he overtook Lieut.-Colonel Pollen, Hamilton’s military secretary, who was talking to three Australians all well over six feet tall. ‘Pollen, who had a soft, somewhat ecclesiastical voice, was saying, “Have you chaps heard that they’ve given General Bridges a posthumous K.C.M.G.?”
‘ “Have they?” one of the giants replied. “Well, that won’t do him much good where he is now, will it, mate?”
‘Poor Pollen, who was longing to be sympathetic and not to mind the way these Australians would stare at his red tabs without saluting, walked on a little depressed by his reception at making conversation, perhaps at the very spot where General Bridges had been mortally wounded. He looked carefully at the ground when he met the next lot, whereupon they all gave him an elaborate salute, and then because he had looked up too late to acknowledge it one of them turned to the others and said: “I suppose that’s what they call breeding.” They really were rather difficult.’
But it was the physical appearance of the Dominion soldiers—Colonials as they were then called—that captivated everybody who came to Anzac, and there is hardly an account of the campaign which does not refer to it with admiration and even a kind of awe. ‘As a child,’ Mackenzie wrote, ‘I used to pore for hours over those illustrations of Flaxman for Homer and Virgil which simulated the effect of ancient pottery. There was not one of those glorious young men I saw that day who might not himself have been Ajax or Diomed, Hector or Achilles. Their almost complete nudity, their tallness and majestic simplicity of line, their rose-brown flesh burnt by the sun and purged of all grossness by the ordeal through which they were passing, all these united to create something as near to absolute beauty as I shall hope ever to see in this world.’
The soldiers themselves might not have thought of it in this way, but here perhaps, in this unlikely place, was the expression of Rupert Brooke’s dream of war, the Grecian frieze, the man entirely heroic and entirely beautiful, the best in the presence of death. Just for this moment at the end of May and in the months that followed they were the living embodiment of the legend they were creating. This was the highest moment of their countries’ short history; they had fought and won their first great battle, they were still in the glow of it, they knew suffering and they were not afraid. They had made a fortress of this wretched strip of foreign soil on which they had so haphazardly drifted, and they were quite determined to hold on. Never again in the whole course of the campaign did the Turks attempt an assault in force upon the Anzac bridgehead.
CHAPTER TEN
DURING the first few weeks of the campaign the wildest rumours went about Constantinople; ten thousand British were said to have been killed at the landing, and another thirty thousand taken prisoner. At one moment the Allies were reported to be advancing on the city and at the next they had been driven into the sea. Once again there was talk of special trains that were to evacuate the Government into the interior, of bombardments and of riots. Yet it was not quite the same ferment, the near panic, that had followed the naval attack on the Narrows in March. The Allied Fleet then had been feared in much the same way as the Air Force bombers were feared at the start of the second world war, but a military campaign on land was something that everyone could understand, a slower and a more familiar thing; there was no question of the capital being demolished overnight.
Enver took a firm line from the outset; he announced flatly that the Allies were already defeated, and to celebrate the event there was a ceremony at St. Sophia at which the Sultan was invested with the tide of El Ghazi, the Conqueror, the driver of the Allies into the sea. Flags were hung out in all the principal streets and public squares.
It is doubtful if anyone was much impressed by this, but by the end of the first week in May it was clear at least that the invading army was not making much headway. An apathetic quiet settled on the streets, and the city began to accustom itself to the suspense, the misery and the occasional shocks of a long campaign. Presently the old familiar signs of war began to appear: the conscripts marching through the streets in their shabby field grey uniforms and pyramidal hats, the Army communiqués that announced yesterday’s victory all over again, the ferocious newspaper articles, the flags and the parades, the spy hunt and the renewed outburst of official xenophobia.
Once again the foreign minorities, the Armenians and the Greeks, went underground with their thoughts and, where they could, their belongings. Bedri, the Chief of Police, pursued them as persistently as he could, issuing worthless receipts for the goods he seized from their shops and houses, and extracting money by the simple process of keeping people in gaol until they bought themselves out. One day his men swooped on the Bon Marché and carried off all the boxes of toy soldiers in the shop on the ground that they had been manufactured in France.
After the first rush on the banks and the s
tores there was the usual shortage of coal and petrol. ‘The bazaar is dead,’ one of the foreign diplomats wrote in his diary. ‘Nothing is bought or sold.’ The Germans, meanwhile, managed to exercise a censorship on news since they controlled the newsprint that was imported into the country and issued it only to those newspapers which took a line that was strongly favourable to Germany.
For the rest, however, the rhythm of the city was not much changed, and travellers arriving there on the Orient Express were astonished at how normal it all was. The lights went on at night, the Pera Palace Hotel was open, the restaurants appeared to have plenty of food, and for the rich at least the war continued to rumble somewhere in the distance, unseen and only faintly heard like a far-off summer thunderstorm which yet might blow itself away. Even the bombardments of the Bosphorus by the Russian Black Sea Fleet caused very little alarm, for they were hit-and-run affairs and soon ceased altogether. At the international club where the foreign diplomats gathered Talaat was often to be seen serenely playing poker far into the night, and Enver continued to be very confident. He liked to show his visitors his latest trophy from the Dardanelles: an unexploded shell from the Queen Elizabeth mounted on a Byzantine column in his palace garden.
Wangenheim was a masterful figure in Constantinople during these weeks. He would come into the Club in the evening, huge, garrulous and assured, and when the other diplomats gathered round him he would retail the latest news from Potsdam: another 100,000 Russian prisoners taken, a break in the French line on the Marne, another British cruiser sunk in the North Sea. It was known that he had a wireless station attached to his Embassy, and was in direct touch with Berlin, if not with the Kaiser himself.
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