Thus at the end of the first twenty-four hours at Suvla there had been very little change; the troops were barely two miles inland and the generals were in exactly the same places—Hammersley on the beach, Stopford on the Jonquil and Hamilton on Imbros. The only really new factor was that the Turks, having inflicted some 1,600 casualties on the British, which was rather more than the total number of their own force, had retired and the Suvla plain was now empty.
There is something so mocking about this situation, something so wrong, that one feels that it is not explained by all the errors and mischances that had occurred: by the commander-in-chief pacing about his headquarters at Imbros when he might just as well have been asleep, by Stopford lying in bed at sea when he should have been wide awake on shore, by the landing of raw troops at night instead of experienced men at dawn, by the appointment of elderly inefficient commanders, by the excessive secrecy that had kept them so much in the dark, by the thirst and the heat and the uncharted reefs beneath the sea. In the face of so much mismanagement things were bound to go wrong, yet not so wrong as all this. Somewhere, one feels, there must be some missing factor which has not been brought to light—some element of luck neglected, some supernatural accident, some evil chain of coincidence that nobody could have anticipated. And yet it was quite unlike the April landing. One does not have the feeling that it was touch and go at Suvla, that some slight shifting of the pattern would have put things right again. There is instead a strong sense of inevitability; each event leads on quite inexorably to the next, and it cannot have mattered, one feels, whether Hamilton went to bed or not, whether Stopford got ashore or stayed aboard the Jonquil, whether the brigadiers marched in this or that direction—the results would have been just the same. Given this set of conditions everything was bound to continue to its fated end.
But that end was not nearly in sight as night fell on August 7. Nobody had given up hope: it was quite the other way about. A feeling of intense relief had followed the successful landing, and the generals were sure that given a little time to straighten things out they would be able to move on again.
The night was cold and absolutely still. Away to the south at Anzac the artillery was rumbling steadily, but at Suvla not a gun was fired. No attempt was made to push patrols forward either from Chocolate Hill or along Kiretch Tepe, and no contact was made with the enemy anywhere. Soon after 5 a.m. on August 8, when the blazing sun came up, the scene remained as it was on the previous evening; the plain was still empty, no sound of rifle fire was heard, and there were still no Turks on the heights of Tekke Tepe. Willmer had concentrated his men around Anafarta Sagir further to the south, certain that the real, concentrated blow of the British was about to fall on him at any moment.
Hammersley, in fact, had something of the sort in mind, and he set off early on this second morning at Suvla to consult his brigadiers. He was much discouraged, however, by what they told him; the soldiers, they said, were too tired to go on—and when the General heard nothing from Stopford he gave up the idea of making an advance.
Stopford’s actions during this morning of August 8 were almost as simple: a few minutes after 7 a.m. he signalled General Mahon on Kiretch Tepe to entrench. At 9.30 he sent a message of congratulation to his generals and at 10 he communicated his satisfaction to Hamilton. ‘Consider,’ he said, ‘Major-General Hammersley and troops under him deserve great credit for result attained against strenuous opposition and great difficulty.’ And he added, ‘I must now consolidate.’
Hamilton was baffled. What on earth was happening at Suvla? Over 20,000 men had now been on shore for more than twenty-four hours, and he knew from the reports of the Naval Air Service that there was no serious opposition in front of them. Stopford seemed quite contented, but still he did not push on. It had been estimated that the Turks would take about thirty-six hours to get their reinforcements down from Bulair, and now, on the morning of August 8, there were at the most six or seven hours to go. He sent for Colonel Aspinall and told him to get over to Suvla and find out what was going on.
Aspinall got his orders shortly before 6 a.m., and he at once went down to the docks at Imbros with Colonel Hankey, but it was not until 9.30 a.m. that they managed to find a trawler to take them to the mainland. Another two hours went by before they reached Suvla Bay, and there they surveyed with astonishment the scene along the shore. It was, they reported later, like an August Bank Holiday in England. Hardly a sound disturbed the quivering summer air. Many boats were bobbing about on the gentle swell in the bay, and on the beach naked troops were bathing in hundreds and tending their cooking fires. Inland beyond the salt lake there was perfect peace. No one was in a hurry, no one seemed to be very busy, unless it was the group of soldiers who were digging a large entrenchment along the coast. ‘You seem to be making yourselves snug,’ Hankey said to a staff officer standing by. ‘We expect to be here a long time,’ was the reply.
There could be only one explanation of this cheerful atmosphere—the hills had been taken and the front was a long way off—and Aspinall and Hankey went ashore in a much happier frame of mind. Leaving Hankey on the beach, Aspinall at once struck inland in search of Stopford. He had gone only a few paces, however, when an artillery officer came running after him to say that, if he did not take care, he would find himself in front of the front line. It was only a hundred yards away.
‘But where are the Turks?’ Aspinall asked.
‘There aren’t any; but no orders have been issued for an advance and the corps commander is still aboard the Jonquil.’
It seemed then to Aspinall and Hankey that the best thing to do was to find the headquarters of the 10th Division, and they were directed to a stretch of sand on the south side of the bay. Here in a moment they learned the full disillusioning truth. General Hammersley was lying full length on the ground with his head in his hands, and it was evident that he was still very much upset by the shelling of his headquarters and the rush of events since the landing. His chief-of-staff explained despondently that the Army was still pinned to the shore. It so happened that a message had just come in from Stopford asking them to advance, but it had stated, ‘In view of want of adequate artillery support I do not want you to attack an entrenched position held in strength.’ In these circumstances both Hammersley and Mahon had decided that it was perhaps wiser not to go forward until the guns did arrive. The troops were dead-beat, Hammersley said, they had suffered many casualties. Perhaps they might get ahead on the following day.
It was now well after noon, and Aspinall, dioroughly alarmed, set off to see Stopford aboard the Jonquil. The scene that followed is one of the anti-climaxes of the campaign, and it has been described by Aspinall himself in his official history:
‘Arriving on board the Jonquil, about 3 o’clock, Aspinall found General Stopford on deck. He was in excellent spirits, and at once came forward to greet the new arrival. “Well, Aspinall,” he said, “the men have done splendidly, and have been magnificent.” “But they haven’t reached the hills, sir,” said Aspinall. “No,” replied the General, “but they are ashore.”
‘Aspinall urged that he was sure Sir Ian would be disappointed that the high ground had not yet been occupied, and he begged him to issue orders for an immediate advance before the enemy’s troops from Bulair could forestall him.
‘General Stopford replied that he fully realized the importance of losing no time, but that it was impossible to move till the men had rested, and till more guns were ashore. He intended to order a fresh advance next day.’
Aspinall was in a delicate position. He could not himself insist further to a senior officer, and while it was essential to get word to Hamilton immediately, he could hardly put through Stopford’s signals office the highly critical message he had in mind. He solved the difficulty by making off—‘in despair’ he says—to de Robeck’s flagship, the Chatham, on the other side of the bay. There he found both Keyes and the Admiral in a similar state of tense anxiety about the delay. Keyes was furiou
s. He himself had just been over to the Jonquil, and the visit, he wrote later, ‘nearly drove me to open mutiny.’ De Robeck had already sent a signal to Hamilton urging him to come to Suvla and now Aspinall added his word. ‘Just been ashore,’ his message ran, ‘where I found all quiet. No rifle fire, no artillery fire, and apparently no Turks. IX Corps resting. Feel confident that golden opportunities are being lost and look upon situation as serious.’
It so happened that Hamilton did not receive either of these messages; the Admiral’s went permanently astray and Aspinall’s did not turn up till the following morning. But this hardly mattered, for Hamilton was on his way at last. He had waited for news with increasing impatience all through the morning. At 10 he had been momentarily reassured by Stopford’s message saying that Hammersley and his men deserved much credit for their work, and he had replied, ‘You and your troops have indeed done splendidly. Please tell Hammersley how much we hope from his able and rapid advance.’ But soon afterwards his doubts set in again. Where was Aspinall? It was only an hour’s run to Suvla and he had set off shortly after daybreak. Why were there no more messages from Stopford? Why was he consolidating? At 11 a.m. Hamilton had been unable to stand it any longer: he ordered his duty destroyer, an Italian-built Portuguese vessel called the Arno, to stand by to take him to the mainland. And now the evil fate of Suvla added to itself a touch that was perfectly ironic. The Arno was not ready. She had developed boiler trouble, her fires had been drawn, and she would not be able to sail before evening. Then another ship? The Navy was sorry but there was no other ship.
Through the heat of the day Hamilton remained there, a prisoner on his island, until at last at 4.30 in the afternoon the Triad arrived and took him on board. An hour and a half later the yacht ran up alongside the Chatham in Suvla Bay, and Hamilton found de Robeck, Keyes and Aspinall waiting for him there. A few new moves had taken place during the latter part of the afternoon, but they were very largely a repetition of the morning’s events, a further shuffling round in the bemused coil in which they had all been caught from the first moment of the landing. It took Hamilton only a few minutes to hear the outlines of the dismal story, and he then jumped into a fast motor-boat with Roger Keyes and Aspinall and headed across the bay for the Jonquil.
Stopford meanwhile had been ashore for the first time. He had intended to visit Hammersley on the beach at 5 p.m. but he had been a little worried by Aspinall’s visit, and the distinct breeze of impatience that appeared to be blowing from G.H.Q., and so he had put the time forward by an hour. When he arrived on the beach he found that Hammersley was out, but the divisional staff assured him that plans were well advanced for an attack on the following day. Content with this, the General returned to the Jonquil. Yet another message from G.H.Q. was waiting for him there. Reconnaissance planes had been ranging over the peninsula again, and they reported there were still no signs of the enemy on Tekke Tepe. On the other hand, reinforcements of an ominous size had been seen marching down from Bulair, and they were clearly headed for Suvla Bay. Stopford sent another signal to the shore ordering a general advance on the hills, but leaving it to Hammersley to fix the time for the start. He had barely completed these arrangements when Hamilton arrived.
The interview was balanced on a thin edge of courtesy and was very brief. Where were the troops, Hamilton asked, and why weren’t they in the hills? The men were exhausted, Stopford said. They must have artillery to support them. After a night’s rest they would attack in the morning. Why not tonight? Well, for one thing Hammersley was all against a night attack.
‘We must occupy the heights at once,’ Hamilton insisted. ‘It is imperative we get to Ismail Oglu Tepe and Tekke Tepe now.’ But it was insistence in a void, an argument that no longer had any point, in this strange headquarters in the sea. It might have had a point if it had taken place before the landing, had Hamilton driven it home quite ruthlessly and clearly to the generals and the brigadiers and the colonels that there was only one object before them, and that was to get inland. But he had not pressed the argument then, he had left things to Stopford’s discretion, and in the intervening two days his plan had become nothing more than a vague hope hanging in the air. The colonels had told the brigadiers they could not get forward, the brigadiers had passed this on to the divisions, and now he was talking to a tired general who had foreseen it all from the beginning. Stopford had known all along that the plan would not work: you had to have guns.
Hamilton said shortly that he himself would go ashore and talk to Hammersley and the brigadiers.
‘Stopford agreed,’ Hamilton wrote that night in his diary. ‘Nothing, he said, would please him more than if I could succeed where he had failed, and would I excuse him from accompanying me; he had not been very fit; he had just returned from a visit to the shore and he wanted to give his leg a chance. He pointed out Hammersley’s headquarters about 400 yards off and said he, Hammersley, would be able to direct me to the Brigades.
‘So I nipped down the Jonquil’s ladder, tumbled into Roger Keyes’ racing motor-boat and with him and Aspinall we simply shot across the water to Lala Baba. Every moment was priceless. I had not been five minutes on the Jonquil and in another two I was with Hammersley.
‘Under the low cliffs by the sea was a small half-moon of a beach about 100 by 40 yards. At the north end of the half-moon was Hammersley. Asked to give me an idea of the situation he gave me much the same story as Stopford.’
So now they had the same argument all over again. They simply could not do it, Hammersley said, not until eight the following morning. Tomorrow was too late, Hamilton said, were there no troops whatever ready to march? They were asked only to cover two and a half miles, and there were no Turks in front of them. No, Hammersley said, there were no troops ready—unless just possibly the 32nd Brigade. ‘Then tell them,’ Hamilton said, ‘to advance at once and dig themselves in on the crestline.’
It was now 6.30 p.m. on August 8, and the time allowed for the arrival of the enemy reinforcements had long since gone by. And yet, astonishingly, there was still no sign of any new formations gathering on the heights. Nine hours of darkness still lay before them; it was going to be a race, but surely there was time for the 32nd Brigade to gather itself together and march the two and a half miles to the top of Tekke Tepe. If they got just one battalion dug in before dawn it would be enough: the rest of the division could follow later.
Hamilton went back to the Triad. He did not communicate again with Stopford, and no one else bothered to inform Corps Headquarters in the Jonquil that by the commander-in-chief’s orders the plans had been changed and the troops were on the march.
Towards midnight Hamilton walked out on to the deck. The night—this third night on the Suvla beaches—was absolutely still. Somewhere in the hills now the soldiers were creeping upward through the scrub.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
AT Anzac on August 6 there was no confusion over the plans; the commanders knew exactly what they had to do. During the afternoon the Australians were to attack at Lone Pine in the south of the bridgehead, so as to give the Turks the impression that the main assault was coming from that direction, and then, after nightfall, the bulk of Birdwood’s forces were to march up the ravines towards Sari Bair. They hoped to take the crest of the ridge by morning.
The charge at Lone Pine was a particularly desperate adventure, since it was to take place in broad daylight and on a narrow front of only 220 yards where the Turks could concentrate their fire. Yet the soldiers believed in the plan. They believed in it so well and were so eager to fight that guards had to be posted in the rear trenches to prevent unauthorized men from attempting to take part. This was a wise precaution, because when the fighting did begin it created a frenzy that was not far from madness, and men were to be seen offering sums of five pounds or more for the privilege of getting a place in the front line.
Through the midday hours the soldiers committed to the first assault filed quietly into the secret underground tunnel w
hich had been dug about fifty yards in advance of the front line and parallel to it through no-man’s-land. The sandbags plugging the holes from which they were to emerge were loosened, and they lay waiting there in darkness and in fearful heat, while the artillery barrage thundered over their heads. At 5.30 p.m. whistles sounded the attack along the line. It was the strangest of battles; soldiers erupting from the ground into the bright sunlight, others leaping up from the trenches behind them, and all of them with shouts and yells running forward into the scrub. They had about a hundred yards to go, and when they arrived at the Turkish line they found that the trenches had been roofed over with heavy pine logs. Some of the men dropped their rifles and started to claw these logs aside with their hands, others simply fired down through the chinks into the Turks below, others again went running on to the open communication trenches and there they sprang down to take the enemy in the rear. In the semi-darkness under the pine logs there was very little space to shoot; on both sides they fought with bayonets and sometimes without any weapons at all, kicking and struggling on the ground, trying to throttle one another with their hands.
Although in after years the action at Lone Pine was very carefully chronicled—the attacks and counter-attacks that followed one another through the day and night for a week on end—it is not really possible to comprehend what happened. All dissolves into the confused impression of a riot, of a vicious street-fight in the back alleys of a city, and the metaphor of the stirred-up ant-heap persists; it was the same frantic movement to and fro, the agitated jerking and rushing and the apparent absence of all meaning except that contained in the idea of mutual destruction. It was the kind of fighting which General Stopford could hardly have understood.
Seven Victoria Crosses were won at Lone Pine, and in the first few days’ fighting alone something like 4,000 men were killed there. On this first evening, however, the important thing was that by 6 p.m. the Australians had captured the Turkish front line and were resisting every effort to turn them out. If they did not altogether deceive Essad Pasha as to the true direction of Birdwood’s main attack, at least they made it impossible for him to obtain reinforcements from this part of his line. By nightfall the way was clear for the main assault on Sari Bair ridge to begin.
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