Before daybreak on August 8 Liman rode out towards the Suvla plain to watch the attack, and was a good deal annoyed to find that nothing whatever was happening. No soldiers had reached the startline, and except for the British clustering around the Suvla beaches there was no sign of movement anywhere. After an hour or two a staff officer turned up and explained that there had been a delay—the Bulair troops could not be expected for several hours. Liman curtly ordered the attack to be put in at sunset and went off to see what was happening at Anzac.
At 2 p.m. Feizi Bey had a conference with his staff, and they agreed that it was now too late for anything to be done that day; the men were exhausted after their long march, many had still not arrived, and to attack across exposed ground with the setting sun shining in their eyes would mean certain disaster. The battle was put off until dawn on the following day, August 9.
Liman was extremely impatient when he heard this news. He said over the telephone that the situation had become very serious, and that it was absolutely essential that the Saros group should attack that night. Willmer’s small forces might crack at any moment and the British would gain the heights. Feizi Bey replied he would do what he could but he was back on the telephone to Liman again a little later. An immediate attack, he said, was quite impossible. His generals were against it and so were his staff. The men had been without sleep for two nights, they were short of guns and supplies of every kind. They were without water. Tomorrow morning was the very earliest moment that a move could be made.
It was absurdly like the scene that was being played out at this instant just a few miles away on the Suvla coast between Hamilton and Stopford. Feizi’s arguments were precisely Stopford’s, and there was nothing that Hamilton was saying that Liman left unsaid. One has a glimpse of a strange pattern of enemies here. Had the circumstances permitted it, General Stopford and Feizi Bey might have found much to commune with together, for Stopford too had not enjoyed his harrying from G.H.Q. nor Hamilton’s direct interference in the battle. It even seems possible that Hamilton and Liman might have felt themselves closer to each other than to their reluctant generals, for they had a common emotion of frustration and impotence; each thought he was being baulked, not by bad luck or any fault in his plans, but by the incompetence of his corps commander.
Yet on balance Liman’s situation was worse than Hamilton’s—even much worse. Hamilton at least had his men on the spot, and at that moment was getting out orders for them to advance to the vital ridge at Tekke Tepe. At Anzac Birdwood was preparing still another onslaught on Sari Bair, and Allanson and the New Zealanders at the spearhead were getting ready for their final rush to the summit. The Turks on Chunuk Bair were in a more critical position than anyone on the British side had guessed. Their casualties had been appalling: one after another the senior officers had been killed or wounded, and they had been forced to put a certain Lieut.-Colonel Potrih in command. He can hardly have been a really useful commander, for he was the Director of Railways at Constantinople, and it was only by chance that he was visiting the front at this moment. Then too, in the course of the fighting the battalions had become scarcely less mixed up than the British, and their battle order was now chaotic. A stream of agitated messages was coming in from the junior officers in the line. ‘An attack has been ordered on Chunuk Bair,’ one message ran. ‘To whom should I give this order? I am looking for the battalion commanders but I cannot find them. Everything is in a muddle.’ And again: ‘I have received no information about what is going on. All the officers are killed and wounded. I do not even know the name of the place where I am. I cannot see anything by observation. I request in the name of the safety of the nation that an officer be appointed who knows the area well.’ And still again—‘At dawn some troops withdrew from Sahinsirt towards Chunuk Bair and they are digging in on Chunuk Bair but it is not known whether they are friends or enemies.’
These were the men upon whom Allanson was preparing to rush at first light in the morning.
At Helles too things had suddenly become very sinister for the Turks. Although the British did not know it, their holding attack had extended the Turkish defence to the edge of its endurance, and the German chief-of-staff there had lost his nerve. He had sent a signal to Liman urging that the whole tip of the peninsula should be abandoned—that the troops there should be evacuated across the Dardanelles to Asia ‘while there is still time to extricate them’.
But Liman’s methods were a good deal more ruthless than those of the British Commander-in-Chief, and in this triple crisis he acted very promptly. He removed the German chief-of-staff from his post at Cape Helles, and instructed the commanding general there that in no circumstances whatever was a single yard of ground to be given up. As for the unfortunate Feizi Bey, who had failed to make his attack at Suvla, he was dismissed out of hand. He was woken out of his sleep at 11 p.m. that night and bundled off to Constantinople. A new command was created embracing the whole battle area from Chunuk Bair to Suvla, and it was given to Mustafa Kemal.
In his account of the campaign Liman gives no explanation of why his choice fell on Kemal. He simply says, ‘That evening I gave command of all the troops in the Anafarta section to Colonel Mustafa Kemal . . . I had full confidence in his energy.’ Yet it was a surprising appointment to make. One can only conclude that Liman had long since divined Kemal’s abilities, but had been prevented by Enver from promoting him. But now in this extreme crisis he could afford to ignore Enver.
Kemal had been in the heaviest of the fighting on the Anzac front from the beginning. His 19th Division had met the first shock of the New Zealand advance; it had demolished the Australian Light Horse on August 7 and it had been fighting night and day ever since. In Kemal’s view the Turkish position had, by then, become ‘extremely delicate’, and he told Liman’s chief-of-staff so over the telephone on August 8. Unless something was quickly done to straighten out the tangle on Chunuk Bair, he said, they might be forced to evacuate the whole ridge. A unified command on the front was essential. ‘There is no other course,’ he went on, ‘but to put all the available troops under my command.’
Liman’s chief-of-staff at that stage had no notion that Kemal, who was always a troublesome figure at headquarters, was about to be promoted, and he permitted himself to say ironically, ‘Won’t that be too many troops?’
‘It will be too few,’ Kemal replied.
So now, after he had been awake for two nights at Anzac and continually in the front line, Kemal suddenly found himself in charge of the battle. He seems to have been not at all dismayed. Having calmly given orders to his successor in command of the 19th Division on Battleship Hill, he got on his horse and rode across the dark hills to Suvla. One has a vivid picture of him on this solitary midnight ride. Physically he was quite worn out, and his divisional doctor was giving him doses to keep him going. He had grown very thin, his eyes were bloodshot, his voice grating with fatigue, and the battle had brought him to a state of nervous tension which was perhaps not far from fanaticism, except that it was fanaticism of a cold and calculating kind.
With his doctor and an A.D.C. following on behind, he turned up at Willmer’s headquarters in the Suvla hills soon after midnight, and spent the next two hours making himself familiar with the front. No one was able to tell him very much about the movements of the British, but he decided to make a general attack along the whole line from Tekke Tepe to the Sari Bair ridge in the morning. The Bulair force had now arrived, and at 4 a.m. orders were sent out to the commanders telling them to be ready to start in half an hour; they were to advance directly to the heights and then charge down into the Suvla plain on the other side.
As dawn was about to break the Tekke Tepe ridge was still empty. The British 32nd Brigade had not got under way so promptly as Hamilton had hoped on the previous night. Seven hours had gone by while the men groped about in the thick scrub, constantly losing themselves in the winding goat tracks, and it was not until 3.30 a.m. that the brigade was assembled be
low the summit. At 4 a.m. it advanced at last, and it was just half an hour too late; as the men in the leading company went forward the Turks burst over the rise above them. It was a tumultuous charge, and it annihilated the British. Within a few minutes all their officers were killed, battalion and brigade headquarters were over-run, and men were scattering everywhere in wild disorder. In the intense heat of the machine-gun fire the scrub burst into flames, and the soldiers who had secreted themselves there came bolting into the open like rabbits, with the smoke and flames billowing out behind them. At sunrise Hamilton, watching from the deck of the Triad, was presented with an awful sight. His men were streaming back across the plain in thousands, and at 6 a.m., only an hour and a half after the battle had begun, there seemed to be a general collapse. Not only were the hills lost, but some of the soldiers in their headlong retreat did not stop until they reached the salt lake and the sea. ‘My heart has grown tough amidst the struggles of the peninsula,’ he wrote in his diary that night, ‘but the misery of this scene wellnigh broke it. . . . Words are no use.’
Another two hours went by before the Turkish fire slackened and the British began to rally themselves on a line across the centre of the plain. Hamilton then went ashore to look for Stopford, who had landed overnight at a place called Ghazi Baba, close to the extreme tip of the northern arm of the bay. ‘We found Stopford,’ he says, ‘about four or five hundred yards to the east of Ghazi Baba, busy with part of a Field Company of engineers supervising the building of some splinterproof headquarters huts for himself and his staff. He was absorbed in the work, and he said it would be well to make a thorough good job of the dug-outs as we should probably be here for a very long time. . . . As to this morning’s hold-up, Stopford took it very philosophically.’
And still the polite façade between the two men did not fail. Since headquarters was without news of the left flank on Kiretch Tepe Hamilton suggested that it might be a godd thing if he went off on a reconnaissance in that direction. Stopford agreed, but thought that he himself had better stay at headquarters to deal with the messages coming in. Upon this Hamilton set off with an A.D.C. on a long walk towards the hills and the Corps Commander returned to the building of his huts.
Later that day Stopford sent out a message to one of his divisional generals congratulating him on his stand. ‘Do not try any more today,’ he added, ‘unless the enemy gives you a favourable chance.’
Kemal had watched the battle from a hilltop behind the front line, and by midday he was satisfied that he had nothing more to fear from the British on the Suvla front. But by now alarming messages had reached him from Sari Bair: Allanson had gained the ridge and the centre of crisis had obviously shifted there. At 3 p.m. Kemal went off on horseback through the blazing heat, and having called in on Liman’s headquarters on the way, reached Chunuk Bair just as the evening light was failing. The situation there had grown worse. Allanson and his men had been withdrawn, but other British troops had taken up their positions on the hill; a fresh Turkish regiment which was due to come up from Helles had not arrived, and the troops in the line were to some extent demoralized by the British artillery fire and the continuing strain of the battle. Kemal, who was now spending his fourth night on his feet, at once ordered an attack for four-thirty on the following morning, August 10. His staff protested that the men were incapable of further effort, but Kemal merely repeated his order and went off on a personal reconnaissance along the front.
It was the last gasp of the battle, the final spasm that was to decide the issue one way or another. On both sides the men had been fighting for three days and nights without sleep, and with very little water or food. The trenches behind them were choked with dead and wounded, and most of those who were still living looked out on their hideous surroundings through a fog of exhaustion. They lay on the ground, they waited, and they responded to their orders like robots with dull mechanical movements. They were ready enough to go on fighting, but some of them hardly knew what they were doing, and the end of the nightmare in which they were living was now becoming more important to them than the idea of victory. It had been so hot through the day that water had begun to seem like the one last luxury in the world, more urgent even than sleep, and when water mules went by men ran forward to lick the moisture off the canvas buckets.
On Chunuk Bair the trenches were barely thirty yards apart, and Kemal got two regiments into his front line very quietly through the night. All depended on whether or not the British guns fired on this mass of closely-packed men before they could charge with the light of the morning sun behind them.
When there were still a few minutes to go before daybreak Kemal crept out into no-man’s-land and softly called out a few last words of encouragement to his men as he crawled along. ‘Don’t hurry. Let me go first. Wait until you see me raise my whip and then all rush forward together.’
At four-thirty he stood up between the opposing trenches. A bullet smashed his wrist watch but he raised his whip and walked towards the British line. Four hours later not an Allied soldier remained on Sari Bair.
It had been a fiercer charge than the one at Suvla, more compact and much more desperate, and most of the Turks who took part in it were obliterated by the British artillery on the open slopes. But they managed to win back their lost trenches, and by midday on August 10 not a single height of any importance at Suvla or Anzac was in British hands. At Cape Helles the battle subsided to a fitful end.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
‘BRUTUS:
Art thou anything?
Art thou some god, some angel, or some devil,
That mak’st my blood cold, and my hair to stare?
Speak to me what thou art.
GHOST: Thy evil spirit, Brutus.’
JULIUS CAESAR, Act IV, Scene 3.
THE Suvla-Anzac battles dragged on until the last week in August and, in the way of things at Gallipoli, there were at least two moments when just possibly the British might have broken through. On August 15, Irish troops thrust along the Kiretch Tepe ridge where the main enemy ammunition dump happened to be established. Liman regarded this attack as very dangerous. ‘If,’ he wrote, ‘on August 15 and 16 the British had taken the Kiretch Tepe they would have outflanked the entire Fifth Army and final success might have fallen to them.’
But the British had no such great objects in view. The attack was no more than a chance afterthought of Stopford’s, and the men were so ill-provided with ammunition that they were reduced at one stage to throwing rocks and stones at the Turks; and so in a day or two it petered out.
Then on August 21 Hamilton delivered a major assault on Scimitar Hill and Hill 60 on the south-east of the Suvla plain, and the 29th Division was brought round from Cape Helles to lead it. The soldiers fought in an unseasonable fog which obscured the hills from the British artillery at the opening of the battle, and as the day went on scrub fires broke out, filling the air with acrid smoke. In terms of numbers of men engaged this was the greatest battle fought in the Gallipoli campaign, and the last Turkish reserves were used up in bringing the Allies to a halt at nightfall. Yet in reality the issue had been decided on August 10, when Kemal recaptured the heights of Tekke Tepe and Chunuk Bair, and these later engagements were merely a restatement of the fact that when surprise was lost so too was the battle. There were no serious alterations in the front line.
Stopford continued adamant for inaction and entrenchment to the end. He protested in a series of messages to G.H.Q. that his New Army troops had let him down, that he was still without sufficient water and guns. On August 13, when the full bitterness of his failure was becoming apparent, Hamilton asked himself, ‘Ought I to have resigned sooner than allow generals old and yet inexperienced to be foisted on me?’ But he still took no action about Stopford, and it was Kitchener who extricated him from the skein of chivalry in which he was enmeshed. ‘If you deem it necessary to replace Stopford, Mahon and Hammersley,’ Kitchener cabled on August 14, ‘have you any competent generals to take th
eir place? From your report I think Stopford ought to come home.’ A few hours later the Field Marshal cabled again, saying that General Byng, one of the men for whom Hamilton had pleaded in vain before the offensive began, was now to come out to Gallipoli from France. And he added, ‘I hope Stopford has been relieved by you already.’
Next day Hamilton sent for General de Lisle, the commander of the 29th Division, and told him to take over from Stopford at Suvla. General Mahon of the 10th Division was senior to de Lisle, and Hamilton wrote him a tactful note asking him to accept de Lisle’s orders until Byng arrived. But Mahon would have none of this. ‘I respectfully decline,’ he replied, ‘to waive my seniority and to serve under the officer you mention. Please let me know to whom I am to hand over the command of the Division.’ He was sent to cool off on the island of Lemnos, and the other elderly generals were dispatched with less ceremony; one of them who came to Hamilton and frankly admitted that he was not competent was found a job at the base, another was returned to England with Stopford, and on August 23 Hammersley was taken off the peninsula in a state of collapse.
They were all angry, disillusioned and exhausted. ‘An ugly dream came to me last night,’ Hamilton wrote. ‘. . . I was being drowned, held violently under the Hellespont. The grip of a hand was still on my throat, the waters were closing over my head as I broke away and found myself wide awake. I was trembling and carried back with me into the realms of consciousness an idea that some uncanny visitor had entered my tent . . . never have I suffered from so fearful a dream. For hours afterwards I was haunted by the thought that the Dardanelles were fatal: that something sinister was afoot: that we, all of us, were predoomed.’
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