Despite the reinforcements, there was still a feeling that the Dardanelles was a poor relation to the French front, and an interminable telegram battle with the War Office went on. In July Churchill had been expected to come to Gallipoli, and he was awaited with much eagerness. At the last moment, however, the visit was blocked by Churchill’s political opponents in cabinet, and Colonel Maurice Hankey, the Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, was sent out instead. Hamilton at first found it difficult to suppress a feeling of antipathy towards this relatively junior officer who was to report directly to the cabinet at home, and it was not until Hankey had been a week or more on Imbros that the staff realized that he was anxious only to use his exceptional talents for their good.
Mackenzie records an odd scene when he was lunching one day with the generals at their mess at G.H.Q. ‘The one next to me,’ he says, ‘was Sir Frederick Stopford, a man of great kindliness and personal charm, whose conversation at lunch left me at the end of the meal completely without hope of victory at Suvla. The reason for this apprehension was his inability to quash the new General opposite, who was one of the Brigadiers in his Army Corps. This Brigadier was holding forth almost truculently about the folly of the plan of operations drawn up by the General Staff, while Sir Frederick Stopford appeared to be trying to reassure him in a fatherly way. I looked along the table to where Aspinall and Dawnay (two of Hamilton’s general staff officers) were sitting near General Braithwaite; but they were out of earshot and the dogmatic Brigadier continued unchallenged to enumerate the various military axioms which were being ignored by the Suvla plan of operations. For one thing, he vowed, most certainly he was not going to advance a single yard until all the Divisional Artillery was ashore. I longed for Sir Frederick to rebuke his disagreeable and discouraging junior; but he was deprecating, courteous, fatherly, anything except the Commander of an Army Corps which had been entrusted with a major operation that might change the whole course of the war in twenty-four hours.’
Hamilton’s position at this time is difficult to understand, for by now he had broken nearly all the rules which were subsequently evolved by Field-Marshal Montgomery in the second world war for operations of this kind. He had allowed his junior commanders to criticize and change his plan, and he had never conveyed to them by word of mouth exactly what he wanted them to do. Instead of keeping the control of the battle under his own hand, his generals and brigadiers were to act on their own discretion; they were to get forward ‘if possible’. In the same way Hamilton had failed to impress his will on Kitchener and the War Office; he had not wanted these new commanders, they were charming men of his own world, but they were old and they had a fatal lack of experience. Nevertheless, he had accepted them. What was wanted was young commanders with seasoned troops, but at Suvla it was the other way about.
Had Hamilton but known it there existed in his Army a man of quite exceptional ability who would have been the ideal commander for the Suvla operation. This was a brigadier-general named John Monash. Monash is something of an enigma in the first world war, for although Hamilton had noticed that he was an able officer, no one, either at Imbros or at Anzac or anywhere else, seems to have divined his peculiar talents as a leader. He was an Australian Jew, already fifty years of age, and his attainments were extraordinary: he was a Doctor of Engineering, and had also graduated in Arts and Law, in addition to being deeply read in music, in medicine and in German literature. Soldiering had been merely a hobby for Monash but for years he had been enthusiastic about it, and when he had volunteered for service at the outbreak of the war he had been made a colonel. He took a brigade ashore at Anzac in the April landing, and had since done well within the limits of that narrow front, but he had not advanced beyond the rank of brigadier.
This was the man who was soon to rise to the command of an army corps in France, and who towards the end of the war was to be considered as a possible successor to Haig as Commander-in-Chief of all the British Armies in France.
‘Unfortunately,’ Lloyd George wrote in his memoirs, ‘the British did not bring into prominence any commander who, taking all round, was more conspicuously fitted for this post (than Haig). No doubt Monash would, if the opportunity had been given him, have risen to the height of it, but the greatness of his abilities was not brought to the attention of the cabinet in any of the Despatches. Professional soldiers could hardly be expected to advertise the fact that the greatest strategist in the Army was a civilian when the war began, and that they were being surpassed by a man who had not received any of their advantages in training and teaching. . . . Monash was . . . the most resourceful general in the whole British Army.’
But in August 1915 no one had thought of Monash in such terms as these, and indeed he had never been heard of outside his own narrow circle. In the coming battle he was confined to the role of taking one of the Anzac columns on a roundabout route up Sari Bair.
The plan itself was open to serious criticism; except for the Suvla landing it did not force the Turks to react to the British, it was the British who were reacting to the Turks. They were proposing to direct their main attack upon Chunuk Bair, the enemy’s strongest point, and it was not to be one concentrated blow on a broad manageable front, but the most congested of battles in which only a few men could take part at one time, and in the most difficult country where anything and everything could go wrong. The Anzac bridgehead was perfectly safe, and the Turks never had a hope of dislodging the Allies from it. It was an ideal training ground, and the new troops coming out from the United Kingdom might very well have been put in there to hold the line while the main attack was delivered not at Chunuk Bair but at Suvla.
The Australians and New Zealanders were by now the most aggressive fighters in the whole peninsula. They had not been heavily engaged through June and July like the British and the French at Cape Helles. They were eager for action, they wanted space and movement after all these claustrophobic months under the ground, and the Suvla landing, with a broad flanking movement round Sari Bair, was precisely the sort of adventure to which they would have responded. They knew the ground—from their perches in the bridgehead they looked down on it every day—they knew the Turks, and their commanders had all the experience of the April landing behind them.
But apparently neither Hamilton nor Birdwood ever contemplated this course, and it was left to the new soldiers who had never been to war before—who had never been abroad before—to land on the strange dark shore against a trained enemy, without knowing clearly what they had to do. And that perhaps was asking too much.
Yet when all this is said it has to be remembered that very similar errors were committed all over again in the second world war especially in the Italian campaign, and with almost painful fidelity at the time of the landing at Anzio, south of Rome, in 1944. At Gallipoli nothing was yet established, nothing was clear, not even the one principle that the campaign itself was already revealing—that everything which was done by stealth and imagination was a success, while everything that was done by means of the headlong frontal attack was foredoomed to failure. Hamilton was beset by problems that seldom became so acute in the second world war: the rub of the old Regular Army ideas against the new soldier; the preoccupation of the high command with the other front in France; the novelty of the whole conception of an amphibious operation; the hazards of maintaining morale among the troops of so many different nationalities in that distant and difficult place.
Yet despite the hesitations of the new commanders and the complications of the plan there were very good hopes of success as the first week of August ran out. The tired troops at Cape Helles were very ready to try again. At Anzac the spirit of the soldiers was high. The Fleet was more than eager; and the weather held good. Moreover, the Turks on their side were just as prone to error as the British, just as uncertain and no better equipped. Liman at this stage had no new ideas, no clear view of how he might gain the victory. He could think of nothing but to reinforce, to dig in and to hold o
n. Admiral von Usedom, the German commander of the defences of the Dardanelles, wrote to the Kaiser on July 30: ‘How long the Fifth Army can hold the enemy is more than I can prophesy. If no ammunition comes through from Germany, it can only be a question of a short time . . . it is a matter of life and death. The opinion of the Turkish General Headquarters appears to me to incline to a hazardous optimism.’
The German Supreme Command was seriously disturbed about Liman von Sanders at this time. On July 26 they sent a message ordering him to hand over his command to Field-Marshal von der Goltz and to come home to Germany to report. Liman managed to stave off this decision, but he was forced to accept on his staff a certain Colonel von Lossow who was to keep an eye on his superior, and even take a hand in the planning of operations.
But the battle itself soon swallowed up all disagreements and doubts on either side. On August 4 Samson went out on a last reconnaissance over Suvla, and reported that no Turks were on the move there. A shell was fired into the gleaming white surface of the salt lake. This was an unauthorized act which annoyed Hamilton very much, but it did prove that men could walk and even ride a horse on the caked and salty mud. The last intelligence appreciations of the situation were issued to commanders, and some attempt was made to provide them with an idea of the kind of country they would encounter as they made their way inland; they would find water once they got to the hills, they were told, but their progress might be impeded by the thick six-foot high scrub that was cut only by goat tracks.
Nasmith set off on his August cruise which a few days later was to bring its first result in the sinking of the battleship Barbarossa Harradin. And in the islands the invasion fleet assembled: the black beetles, the Isle of Man paddle-steamers, the North Sea trawlers, the yachts, the Thames tugs, the drifters, the monitors, the cruisers and destroyers.
Only bad weather or a Turkish attack could now delay or change the plans. At zero hour de Robeck was to go to Suvla in his new flagship, the light cruiser Chatham, but Hamilton this time elected to remain on shore at Imbros, where he was connected by submarine telephone to Cape Helles, ten miles, and Anzac, fifteen miles, away.
August 6 was a day of calm, hard, glaring sunshine, and in the afternoon when the soldiers were embarking at Imbros they could clearly hear the roar of the guns at Anzac and Cape Helles where the battle had already begun. Bright little stabbing flashes sparkled in the sky. As night fell a few minutes after seven a brilliant crimson sunset expanded along the horizon. Then it was black darkness, with no light showing in the Fleet. The island with its thousands of empty tents and its silence took on an air of terrible desolation. ‘The day before the start is the worst day for a commander,’ Hamilton wrote. ‘The operation overhangs him as the thought of another sort of operation troubles the mind of a sick man in hospital.’ He was restless, and walked down to the beach to see the 11th Division go off. The men, packed like herrings in the beetles and on the decks of the destroyers, were silent and listless: ‘These new men seem subdued when I recall the blaze of enthusiasm in which the old lot started out of Mudros harbour on that April afternoon.’ For a moment he debated whether or not he should have cruised round the invasion fleet in a motor launch, saying a few encouraging words to each unit as he went along, but he dismissed the idea when he remembered that the men did not know him by sight; and in any case several hours were to go by before they arrived on the beaches, and that was too long an interval for his words to survive.
He looked for Stopford and Reed, hoping that they might have done something to enthuse their soldiers, but they were nowhere to be seen; and he returned to his hut. Nothing to do but to wait.
Stopford had been lying on his valise spread out on the floor of his tent, and Colonel Aspinall found him there. The General had slipped and sprained his knee that morning and was not feeling very well. ‘I want you to tell Sir Ian Hamilton,’ he said, ‘that I am going to do my best, and that I hope to be successful. But he must realize that if the enemy proves to be holding a strong line of continuous entrenchments I shall be unable to dislodge him till more guns are landed.’ Glumly he went on to quote his chief-of-staff: ‘All the teaching of the campaign in France,’ he said, ‘proves that continuous trenches cannot be attacked without the assistance of large numbers of howitzers.’
He rose soon afterwards, and getting aboard the Jonquil with Rear-Admiral Christian, steamed away.
In the darkness Hamilton strolled down to the beach again and saw the ships moving, ghostlike and silent, to the boom across the mouth of the harbour. ‘This empty harbour frightens me,’ he wrote later. ‘Nothing in legend is stranger or more terrible than the silent departure of this silent Army.’
Then he went back to his tent to keep a vigil with his telephones through the night.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
MUSTAFA KEMAL kept a record of his own activities during the campaign, and it is quite unlike anything else that has been written about Gallipoli. It is a kind of day book, half pamphlet and half military history, a mixture of the intensely egoistical and the very practical. Long arid passages about the movements of regiments are followed by outbursts of almost childish jingoism (the equivalent of the Allies’ ‘One of our men is worth half a dozen Turks’). At times he breaks off to moralize: ‘What a fine mirror history is. . . . In great events which pass to the bosom of history how clearly do the conduct and acts of those who take an active part in these events show their moral character.’ There is a strong suggestion throughout that the other commanders are wrong while he is right, and his approach to all but a few of his superior officers is at once obsequious and contemptuous. Yet he argues very closely, he always sees the battle from a fresh point of view, and he is very precise about such things as dates and place-names and the movements of troops.
There is no reason to think that this document has been edited or changed by others with an eye to the General’s later career as the dictator of Turkey; the original notebook is preserved by the Historical Branch of the Turkish General Staff at Ankara, and most of it is filled with Kemal’s own handwriting in the fine arabic script which he later abolished in Turkey in favour of the more practical and much less beautiful Latin alphabet. The rest of the notebook has been dictated to an assistant either on the battlefield itself or shortly afterwards.
There is one very interesting passage dealing with the period immediately before the Suvla landing. As so often happened, Kemal was involved in a dispute with his commanding officer—in this case Essad Pasha, the Corps Commander opposite Anzac. It had been decided to extend Kemal’s divisional front in the north of the Anzac bridgehead so as to take in part of a ravine known as Sazlidere. Kemal at once protested that this was too much responsibility for him to undertake. He went on and on about it, writing letter after letter (which he quotes) to Corps Headquarters. Essad took the line that this was all very unimportant, but, since Kemal wished it, he would remove the area from the 19th divisional front and take it under his own command. This did not suit Kemal at all. He replied that the Sazlidere area was so important that it must be put under a strong independent command; did they not realize that it was quite possible for the enemy to advance by day up to the very foot of Sari Bair under the cover of this deep ravine? Essad answered that he was in feet establishing an independent command from Suvla to the north of Anzac, and a German officer was coming out to take charge of it. The dividing line between his and Kemal’s command would be the Sazlidere ravine—or at any rate the upper part of it, since the mouth was already occupied by the enemy.
Once again Kemal protested; a dividing line between two commands, he said, was always the weakest point. The responsibility for Sazlidere must be made perfectly clear, and strong forces posted there. Essad was growing weary of the argument. ‘Little valleys like this,’ he wrote, ‘cannot be inclusive or exclusive of either side.’ However, he agreed to come down one day with his chief-of-staff to survey the position. Kemal led them to his advance headquarters on a plateau known to the British a
s Battleship Hill, and from there they looked down, as from an aircraft, at the coastline to the north of Anzac, the salt lake glistening in the distance by the sea, the empty bay at Suvla, the hills to the east, and in between, the flat plain reaching up to the tangle of foothills around Sazlidere at their feet. The three crests of Sari Bair—Chunuk Bair, Hill Q and Koja Chemen Tepe—with their apparently unclimbable slopes, rose up above them immediately to their right.
Kemal reports the discussion that followed in these words: ‘Seeing this view, the Chief-of-Staff of the Corps said, “Only raiding parties could cross this ground.”
‘The Corps Commander turned to me and said, “Where will the enemy come from?” Pointing with my hand in the direction of Ari Burnu, and along the whole shore as far as Suvla, I said, “From here”.
‘ “Very well, supposing he does come from there, how will he advance?” Again pointing towards Ari Burnu, I moved my hand in a semi-circle towards Koja Chemen Tepe. “He will advance from here,” I said. The Corps Commander smiled and patted my shoulder. “Don’t you worry, he can’t do it,” he said. Seeing that it was impossible to convince him I felt it unnecessary to prolong the argument any further. I confined myself to saying, “God willing, sir, things will turn out as you expect”.’
In short, Kemal had anticipated the general lines of Hamilton’s attack—the landing at Suvla, the advance up Sazlidere and the neighbouring ravines to the crests of Sari Bair—and perhaps it was only human that Kemal later should have written in his journal: ‘When from the 6th August onwards the enemy’s plans turned out just as I expected and tried to explain, I could not imagine the feelings of those who, two months before, had insisted on not accepting my explanations. Events were to show that they had been mentally unprepared and that due to insufficient measures in the face of hostile action, they had allowed the whole situation to become critical and the nation to be exposed to very great danger.’
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