It was on Boyle’s third trip into the Marmara, on July 21, that a new hazard was discovered. As he passed through the Narrows he saw an obstruction under the water, and he reported this to Lieut.-Commander Cochrane in the E 7, when he met her in the Marmara next day. On July 24 Cochrane came out and he confirmed Boyle’s report: the Germans were building a net. He himself had been entangled in it for half an hour, ninety feet down.
This was a much more formidable obstacle than anything the submarines had encountered before. By the end of July it was completed—a vast steel mesh of two-and-a-half-inch wire stretching entirely across the straits, and reaching 220 feet down to the floor of the channel. A line of buoys painted alternately red and black supported it on the surface, and one end was secured on the peninsula about a mile north of Maidos, the other on a steamer anchored near Abydos on the Asiatic side. Turkish motorboats loaded with bombs patrolled the surface like spiders waiting at the edge of a web. Specially sited guns were set up on either bank.
There was a gate in the middle of the net, and unless the submarines were lucky enough to strike it their only way of getting through the wire was to ram it at full speed underwater and hope for the best. Boyle described this experience: ‘I missed the gate and hit the net. I was brought up from eighty feet to forty-five feet in three seconds, but luckily only thrown fifteen degrees off my course. There was a tremendous noise, scraping, banging, tearing and rumbling, and it sounded as if there were two distinct obstructions, as the noise nearly ceased and then came on again, and we were appreciably checked twice. It took about twenty seconds to get through.’
But Cochrane on his next trip did not get through. Hopelessly entangled, he fought the net for twelve hours on the bottom of the straits while bombs exploded about him, and it was only when the hull was leaking and the lights had failed that he burned his papers and rose to the surface to surrender.
Nasmith, Boyle and the others were not deterred; they continued to pass through, and by the end of the year the net was so damaged by their repeated rammings it had almost vanished altogether. Up to the last, however, the passage through the Narrows remained an ordeal of the most frightening kind, and perhaps from that very fact it acted as a psychological stimulus on the crews. One seems to have read the story in some boyhood book of sea adventure: the pirates’ cave with its treasure lies hidden in the cliffs, but one has to make a dangerous dive beneath the sea to reach it. And some get through and some get trapped halfway.
There is an almost dolphin-like air, a precise abandon, in the way the E-boats frisked about at times. On seeing a convoy, the commanders would deliberately surface and pretend to be in difficulties so as to entice the protective gunboats away. Then, diving deep, they would turn back and demolish the boats of the convoy one by one. They shot up the caravans of camels and bullock carts making their way down the Bulair isthmus with loads of barbed wire and ammunition. When they were short of fresh food they surfaced beside the Turkish trading caiques and provided themselves with fruit and vegetables. Wherever they could they saved their torpedoes and their ammunition by boarding enemy ships and simply opening the sea-cocks or placing a charge on the keel. Sometimes prisoners were carried around for days on end before they could be put ashore, and these were often very strange people—Arabs in their desert robes, sponge-divers and Turkish Imams, and once a German banker, wearing only a short pink vest, who complained that 5,000 marks in gold had just been sent to the bottom.
When more than one submarine was operating the commanders would make a rendezvous, and with their vessels tied up together far out in the Sea of Marmara they would exchange information for an hour or two, while their crews bathed in the sunshine; and then perhaps they would go off on a hunt together. Once there was a disaster. The French Turquoise ran aground and was captured. Enemy intelligence officers found in the captain’s notebook a reference to a meeting which he was to have at sea in a few days’ tine with the British E 20. It was a German U-boat that kept the rendezvous, and she torpedoed E 20 directly she came to the surface. Only the British commander and eight of the crew who were on deck survived.
In August Nasmith sank the battleship Barbarossa Harradin. Expecting that she would come south to take part in a new battle on the peninsula, he lay in wait for her at the top of the Narrows—having, on the way through, scraped heavily against a mine. The battleship appeared in the early dawn escorted by two destroyers, and she was taken utterly by surprise. She capsized and sank within a quarter of an hour.
Nasmith then went on to Constantinople and arrived just at the moment when a collier from the Black Sea had berthed herself beside the Haidar Pasha railway station. Coal at this time had become more precious than gold at Constantinople, since it was so scarce and since everything depended upon it—the railways and the ships, the factories, the city’s supply of light and water. A committee of officials was standing on the wharf discussing how the coal should be apportioned when E 11’s torpedo struck and the ship blew up before their eyes.
Next the submarine turned into the Gulf of Ismid, where the Constantinople-Baghdad railway ran over a viaduct close to the sea, and there d’Oyly-Hughes, the first officer, swam ashore and blew up the line. Like Freyberg at the beginning of the campaign, he was half dead when the E 11 picked him up again.
There were in all 13 submarines engaged in the Sea of Marmara, and although 8 were destroyed the passage was made 27 times. The Turkish losses were 1 battleship (apart from the Messudieh sunk in the previous year), 1 destroyer, 5 gunboats, 11 transports, 44 steamers and 148 sailing boats. Nasmith’s bag alone was 101 vessels, and he was in the Marmara for three months, including a stay of 47 days—a record that was never surpassed in the first world war. By the end of the year all movement of enemy ships by daylight had practically ceased, and with rare exceptions only the most urgent supplies were sent by sea to the peninsula.
It is doubtful if the success of the submarines was ever fully understood by the British while the campaign was going on. At Hamilton’s and de Robeck’s headquarters the sinkings seem to have been regarded more in the nature of a delightful surprise, a bonus on the side, than as the basis for a main offensive. It never seems to have occurred to them that they might have followed up d’Oyly-Hughes’ adventure, that commandos might have been landed north of Bulair to have cut the Turkish land route to the peninsula.
Nor were the Germans any more imaginative. Five small U-boats were eventually assembled at Pola, and managed to get through to Constantinople, but apart from one or two lucky shots at transports coming out of Alexandria they made no further attempt on the Fleet at Gallipoli. By September forty-three German U-boats had been sent to the Mediterranean, but the bulk of the pack remained in the western half of the sea, and they failed to sink any of the ships bringing reinforcements out from England.
And so there was, even as early as May, some reasonable chance of the expedition gathering impetus again. If the Allies were being starved of supplies, so too were the Turks; the lost British battleships were being replaced by monitors, and with the arrival of the Lowland division Hamilton’s forces outnumbered the enemy in the peninsula.
Hamilton in any case was an optimistic man. The sinking of the battleships had been a terrible blow, and on board the Arcadian the General himself was living in the most insecure conditions, so insecure indeed that two transports were lashed to the ship’s side to act as torpedo-buffers. Dismayed but still buoyant, he wrote in his diary: ‘We are left all alone in our glory with our two captive merchantmen. The attitude is heroic but not, I think, so dangerous as it is uncomfortable. The big ocean liners lashed to port and starboard cut us off from light as well as air, and one of them is loaded with Cheddar. When Mr. Jorrocks awoke James Pigg and asked him to open the window to see what sort of a hunting morning it was, it will be remembered that the huntsman opened the cupboard by mistake and made the reply, “Hellish dark and smells of cheese.” Well, that immortal remark hits us off to a T. Never mind. Light will be vo
uchsafed. Amen.’
Useless now to reflect that the Triumph and the Majestic—and the Goliath too—might have gone to a better end by making a new attempt on the Narrows; or to think of how the great armada of battleships had been scattered and forced to retire into the harbour at Mudros whence it had so confidently set out a month before. The only thing to do now was to wait for news from London, to hope for reinforcements and to hold on.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
DURING the months of June and July neither side made any serious attempt to attack at Anzac, and while an uneasy stalemate continued there five pitched battles were fought at Cape Helles. They were all frontal attacks, all of short duration, a day or two or even less, and none of them succeeded in altering the front line by more than half a mile.19
This fighting at Cape Helles was the heaviest of the campaign, and it followed the strict pattern of trench warfare: the preliminary bombardment, the charge of the infantry (sometimes as many as five men to four yards of front), the counter-attack, and then the last confused spasmodic struggles to consolidate the line. Nowhere at any time were any important objectives gained; at the end of it all the Turks were no nearer to driving the Allies into the sea and the Allies were hardly any closer to Achi Baba. Even in the killing of men neither side could claim the advantage, since it is estimated that for the period from the first landings in April to the end of July the total casualties were about the same for each: some 57,000 men.
These battles were so repetitive, so ant-like and inconclusive, that it is almost impossible to discover any meaning in them unless one remembers the tremendous hopes with which each action was begun. The generals really did think that they could get through, and so for a while did the soldiers too. Hunter-Weston, the British Corps Commander, was an extremely confident man. ‘Casualties,’ he said one day, ‘what do I care for casualties?’ The remark might not have been particularly distressing to his soldiers; they too were quite prepared for casualties provided they defeated the Turks, and in any case it was nothing remarkable that the General still believed that victories could be achieved by this kind of fighting; with very few exceptions all the other generals, German, Turkish, French and British, in France as well as Gallipoli, believed the same thing. The artillery bombardment followed by the charge of the infantry was believed to be the surgical act that would bring success in the quickest way, and nobody had yet suggested any alternative to it except, of course, poison gas. The real answer to the problem was simple enough: they needed an armoured mobile gun that would break through the enemy machine-gun fire; in other words a tank. But in 1915 the tank was a year or more and several million lives away, and it seemed to both Turkish and Allied staffs alike that they had only to intensify what they were already doing—to employ more men and more guns on narrower fronts—and the enemy would crack.
Since the rules of the game, the actual methods of the fighting, were not in question, the generals had to find other reasons to explain their failure, and on the side of the Allies it usually boiled down to a matter of ammunition. If only they had had more shells to fire all would have been well. Just a few more rounds, another few guns, and the miracle would have happened. It had already been demonstrated at Gallipoli—and it was to be demonstrated over and over again on a much larger scale in France—that artillery bombardment was not the real way out of this suicidal impasse, but the British were strictly rationed in shells at Gallipoli, and this very shortage seemed to indicate that this was where their fatal weakness lay. Through June and July, there were times when Hamilton could think of nothing else, and he sent off message after message to Kitchener pointing out how badly served he was in the matter of ammunition compared with the armies in France.
‘A purely passive defence is not possible for us,’ he wrote; ‘it implies losing ground by degrees—and we have not a yard to lose. . . . But, to expect us to attack without giving us our fair share—on Western standards—of high explosive and howitzers shows lack of military imagination.’ He went on: ‘If only K. would come and see for himself! Failing that—if only it were possible for me to run home and put my own case.’ But he did not go. Sometimes his staff found him looking aged and tired.
Through these months a gradual change overtook the commanders at Cape Helles in the planning of their battles. They did not lose hope, they simply lowered their sights. In the beginning the Allies had envisaged an advance upon Constantinople itself and cavalry was held in reserve for that purpose. By June they were concentrating upon Achi Baba, and the more the hill remained unconquered the more important it seemed: the more it appeared to swell up physically before them on the horizon. By July they were thinking in still more restricted terms: of advances of 700 or 800 yards, of the capture of two or three lines of the enemy trenches. In the same way the Turks gradually began to give up their notions of ‘pushing the enemy into the sea’. After July they tried no more headlong assaults; they were content to contain the Allies and harass them, in their narrow foothold on the sea.
In the many books that were written about the campaign soon after the first world war, there is a constantly repeated belief that posterity would never forget what happened there. Such and such a regiment’s bayonet charge will ‘go down in history’; the deed is ‘immortal’ or ‘imperishable’, is enshrined forever in the records of the past. But who in this generation has heard of Lancashire Landing or Gully Ravine or the Third Battle of Krithia? Even as names they have almost vanished out of memory, and whether this hill was taken or that trench was lost seems hardly to matter any more. All becomes lost in a confused impression of waste and fruitless heroism, of out-of-dateness and littleness in another age. And yet if one forgets the actual battles—the statistics, the plans, the place-names, the technical moves—and studies instead the battlefield itself in its quieter moments, the feelings of the soldiers, what they ate and wore and thought and talked about, the small circumstances of their daily lives, the scene does become alive again and in a peculiarly vivid way. There can scarcely have been a battlefield quite like it in this or any other way.
Usually one approached Cape Helles from either Imbros or Lemnos in one of the trawlers or flat-bottomed boats that provided a kind of ferry service to the beaches after the battleships had sailed away. By day it was a pleasant trip through a sea of cool peacock blue, and it was only when one was within about five miles of the shore that one saw that it was overhung by a vast yellowish cloud of dust. This dust increased during heavy fighting and diminished at night, and with sudden changes of the wind, but it was usually there through these months of early summer. And with the dust a sickly carrion smell came out across the sea, as far as three miles at times. A fringe of debris with the same implications of rottenness and decay washed along the shore. Yet on a quiet day there was a certain toy-like quality in the scene around Sedd-el-Bahr—toylike in the sense that it was very busy, very crowded with ingenious imitations of ordinary life in other, safer places. The long green keel of the Majestic was still clearly visible beneath the sea, and the castle by the beach had a battered appearance as though someone had stamped on it with his foot. The River Clyde was still there, firmly moored to the shore with lighters and other small boats all about her, and she was joined now by another vessel, the old French battleship Magenta, which had been sunk about a quarter of a mile to the west to form a miniature harbour in the bay. Piers had sprung up, and around them thousands of men were bathing, unloading boats, stacking great piles of tins and boxes on the shore. A new road had been cut around the base of the cliff by Turkish prisoners, and lines of horses and mules stood waiting there.
‘The comparison with a seaside resort on a fine bank holiday,’ Compton Mackenzie wrote, ‘arrived so inevitably as really to seem rather trite. Yet all the time the comparison was justifying itself. Even the aeroplanes on the top of the low cliff eastward had the look of an ‘amusement’ to provide a sixpenny or threepenny thrill; the tents might so easily conceal phrenologists or fortune tellers; the signal stati
on might well be a camera obscura; the very carts of the Indian Transport, seen through the driven sand, had an air of waiting goat-carriages.’
With this, however, all further comparison ended; the dust covered all, billowing, choking and vile, and the Turkish shells came through it with the noise of express trains crashing in the sky. This noise was continuous at times, and the soldiers endured it, not as a temporary pain, but as a natural condition of life. It was as inevitable as the weather. You were hit or not hit. Eating, sleeping and waking the long scream went on. These slopes by the sea were supposed to be rest areas, but they were often more dangerous than the frontline trenches a mile or two inland, since they exposed such obvious targets to the enemy: the piers, the incoming boats, the men bathing. From their perch on Achi Baba the Turks overlooked the whole bridgehead, and when the dust lifted they could see every tent, every gun emplacement, every man and animal that moved above the cliffs. The horses and the mules were terribly exposed to this bombardment, but they appeared to notice nothing until they were actually hit. Some blessed lacuna in the brain allowed them to stand there calmly with unfrightened eyes when the bursting shrapnel had sent all human beings to the ground. ‘Fountains of earth, fountains of water,’ a French doctor wrote to his wife; ‘shells cover us with a vault of steel, dissolving, hissing and noisy . . . without this radiantly beautiful light it would be frightfully sad.’
There were some—notably the more elderly men who were experiencing shellfire for the first time—who simply could not stand it and had to be invalided home: ‘Weak minds were upset,’ the doctor wrote. ‘Few were able to keep a real and immediate notion of things. There is a physical exaltation which deforms and obscures everything and makes one incapable of reasoning.’
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