Gallipoli

by Alan Moorehead

  For others, matters had already gone beyond dreams and Philippian visions; some 45,000 Allied soldiers had fallen in these August battles, and the hospital services which had never been organized to deal with such an avalanche of wounded were for a few days in almost as bad a state as anything which Florence Nightingale had found at the Crimea. Even private yachts which had turned up from England were pressed into service as hospital ships. But it was the collapse of the Army’s hopes which was the demoralizing thing. When all was over the gains amounted, in General Godley’s phrase, to ‘five hundred acres of bad grazing ground’; they had enlarged their hold on the peninsula to about eight square miles, perhaps a little less. Now, with Suvla added to their responsibilities, they had ‘three sieges to contend with instead of two’.

  A dull, implacable ennui began to settle on the Allied Army. It was not exactly hopelessness, nor cynicism, it was an absence of purpose in their lives, a mechanical focusing down of their minds on to the simplest and the nearest things, the next meal, the last mail from home. The ‘awful, horrible, lethargic flies’ persisted, and the high dry winds of the early autumn sent the dust billowing through the air. Once more the soldiers began to report sick. Many of them were so weak with dysentery they moved at no faster pace than a crawl, and on the Anzac sector in particular it was noticed that the former panache had gone; the men looked old and drawn, and with any exertion quickly lost their breath. They were sent in brigades to rest camps on Imbros and Lemnos, but they did not recover; they came back into the line again looking very much as though they had never been away. The Indian soldiers, with their simple vegetable diet, stood the heat very well, but the others continued with their bully beef and they hated it. Within a few weeks 800 sick men were being evacuated from the peninsula every day, and it was one more sign of the aimless strain with which they were suffering life rather than living it that the horses which before had been indifferent to shellfire now screamed and trembled at the report of a distant gun.

  Hamilton began a weary struggle to obtain reinforcements from Egypt, where a garrison of 70,000 men was immobilized, but General Maxwell, the commander there, was very reluctant. He was much concerned, he said, over the movements of the Senoussi tribesmen in the Libyan desert: they might attack at any moment. He could release no troops. Hamilton persisted and got the War Office to agree to the dispatch of two battalions. ‘That was yesterday,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘But the Senoussi must have heard of it at once, for Maxwell forthwith cables, “The attitude of the Senoussi is distinctly dangerous, and his people have been latterly executing night manœuvres round our post at Sollum” . . . I have renounced the two battalions with apologies, and now I daresay the Senoussi will retire from his night manœuvres round Sollum and resume his old strategic position up Maxwell’s sleeve.’ Hamilton, too, was becoming bitter.

  The Turks did not attack. Half their entire army was now in the peninsula, but they too had suffered heavily in August, and were numbed by the same lethargy and weariness. It was the spent atmosphere of convalescence—perhaps hardly as yet convalescence—which had followed the assault on Anzac in May and all the other major battles. For the time being they had had enough of mass killing. Once more gifts of food and cigarettes were thrown back and forth between the trenches, and the war ceased to be a matter of rage, of pitched battle in the open, but of individual professional skill. They sniped. They dug tunnels under each other’s lines and exploded mines in them. They made small raids and feints.

  In many ways the men in the opposing trenches must have felt mentally and emotionally closer to one another than to the shadowy figures of the commanding generals and the politicians in the rear. Like poverty, the extreme danger and hardship of the trenches reduced them all, British and Turks alike, to a bare level of existence, and they were set apart from the rest of the world. They may have hated it, but it drew them together, and now more than ever they had for one another the friendly cruelty of the very poor. This was an exact and prescribed arena, and until they were released from it and made safe and comfortable again they were hardly likely to know much about the propaganda animosities and the vicious fears of those who, being behind the lines, endured the war only at second-hand. For the moment the shared misery of dysentery, of flies, of dirt and lice was all.

  Herbert records a curious instance of this detached and clinical attitude in the trenches. ‘The fact is,’ a Turkish prisoner said one day, ‘you are just a bit above our trenches. If you could only get your fire rather lower you will be right into them, and here exactly is the dugout of our captain, Risa Kiazim Bey, a poor, good man. You miss him all the time. If you will take a line on that pine tree you will get him.’

  Sometimes the Turks would parley with Herbert across the front lines, but they resented as a rule being cajoled by deserters who had gone over to the British. Once for a few minutes they listened in silence and then a voice replied: ‘There are still Turks here and sons of Turks. Who are you? A prisoner? Then go away and don’t talk.’

  The end of Ramadan, the Moslem period of fasting, came, and it was expected that the Turks might celebrate it with a new attack. But nothing happened. Instead, the Turkish soldiers made what shift they could to hold a feast in the trenches, and the British at some places sent them gifts.

  By September it was already growing cold at night. A strong west wind would drive the sea into the salt lake at Suvla and hold it there until, after a few hours, the water drained out again. Once or twice there were sharp showers of rain accompanied by vivid lightning, and then on October 8 a gale blew up. It was an ominous warning for the British. At Suvla some of the provisioning barges broke loose and carried away ninety feet of the pier; and there was other damage to the improvised wharves at Anzac. ‘Both sides,’ Herbert wrote, ‘sat down grimly to wait for the winter.’

  The Allies were waiting for something else as well, and it was even more serious than the winter. What was to become of them? Were they to attack again or stay where they were? Could they stay if Bulgaria came into the war against the Allies? If that happened—and it seemed quite likely now that the Suvla offensive had failed—Germany would have a through railway to Turkey. New guns and ammunition, perhaps even German and Bulgarian troops, could be brought down to the peninsula. Where were the reinforcements to meet them? And whether they were reinforced or not, how was the Navy to keep supplying the peninsula in heavy seas?

  The soldiers in the ranks were aware that their fate was being decided in London and Paris, and they discussed the matter interminably in their dugouts. But there was never any definite news. They simply waited.

  Hamilton knew what was going on in London, but it was so secret, so sensational and it so often blew hot and cold from week to week that he was not even able to confide in his corps commanders. In August he admitted to Kitchener that he had failed and could do no more unless he was reinforced again: and he needed another 95,000 men. Kitchener in reply said, in effect, that Gallipoli had been given its chance and lost it. The War Cabinet was now turning its mind back to France, and he had agreed to support Joffre in a vast offensive on the western front in September. Seventy French and British divisions were to be employed, and this meant that apart from normal replacements nothing more could be done for Gallipoli at the moment.

  Then on September 2 a message arrived at Imbros saying that everything was changed. The French had suddenly and quite unpredictably come forward with an offer to send out a new army to the Dardanelles under the command of General Sarrail. Four French divisions were to be embarked at Marseilles to join the two already at Cape Helles, and they were to be landed on the Asiatic side. The British government would replace the French taken from Cape Helles with two fresh divisions of their own. Hamilton could scarcely believe it when he read the cable. ‘From bankrupt to millionaire in twenty-four hours,’ he wrote. ‘The enormous spin of fortune’s wheel makes me giddy.’ Now they were bound to get through; the Turks had had the go knocked out of them already and this new att
ack in Asia would be the finish. He himself would offer to serve under Sarrail if that would help to buttress this wonderful piece of news.

  The appointment of Sarrail was a devious affair with roots reaching back as far as the Dreyfus case. Sarrail, a Radical-Socialist, an anti-cleric, had been relieved of his command at Verdun by Joffre, but he was politically strong enough to force the French government to find him another appointment. And so he was to have this new independent command in the Near East. Joffre was not in a position to block the appointment, but he could delay and weaken it, and this he was already doing by the time Hamilton got his cable. The four French divisions, he insisted, were not to go to the Dardanelles until after the September offensive had been fought on the western front.

  Hamilton got this news on September 14. The earliest date on which the new soldiers could arrive, Kitchener now told him, was mid-November. ‘Postponed!’ the entry runs in Hamilton’s diary. ‘The word is like a knell.’ There was worse to follow.

  In the last week of September Bulgaria mobilized, and it was apparent that within a matter of days she would be marching with the Germans and Austrians against Serbia. There was only one way of bringing help to the Serbians, and that was by attacking Bulgaria through Greece. But the Greek government was now insisting that if she was to enter the war she must be supported by an Allied force at Salonika. There was not much time. Kitchener and Joffre agreed that two divisions, one French and the other British, must be sent from Gallipoli to Salonika at once. If necessary Hamilton would have to abandon Suvla and again confine himself to the bridgeheads at Anzac and Cape Helles.

  This blow fell on Imbros on September 26, and Hamilton forced himself to take it philosophically. He wrote in his diary early in October, ‘At whose door will history leave the blame for the helpless, hopeless fix we are left in—rotting with disease and told to take it easy.’ But he loyally sent off the two divisions to Salonika and fitted them out as well as he could before they left.

  By now, however, events had come to a crisis where two divisions could make little difference one way or another. Joffre’s offensive in the west failed with the loss of a quarter of a million men. Then on October 9 the Germans and Austrians fell on Belgrade, while on the following day the Bulgarians attacked Serbia from the east. The Allies’ force at Salonika was too small, too disorganized and too far away to do anything but to look on helplessly. And it was one more galling twist that the removal of the two divisions from Gallipoli had precisely the reverse effect on Greece to the one anticipated. Seeing Hamilton’s army reduced like this, King Constantine at once made up his mind that the Allies were about to abandon Gallipoli. He dismissed his anti-German Prime Minister, Venizelos, and decided upon a neutrality which, if not actively hostile to the Allies, was at least not helpful.

  There was but one ray of hope for Gallipoli in all this. Keyes wanted the Fleet to assault the Narrows again. He had argued for it after the August battles had failed, he argued all through September, and with a new ally—Admiral Wemyss, the Commander-in-Chief at Lemnos—he was still arguing in October. De Robeck was still opposed but he allowed Keyes to draw up a new plan and propound it to a group of senior admirals at the Dardanelles. They were caught again in the old half-emotional dilemma. They felt deeply about the losses of the Army, they wanted to attack, and they again half believed that in the end the Admiralty would order them to do so. But still they could not clearly see how it was to be done. Eventually a compromise was decided upon: Keyes was to go to London and put the matter personally to the Admiralty and the War Cabinet.

  But this for the moment was a side-issue, a single current moving against a turning tide. After the September offensive Joffre still withheld the four divisions earmarked for the Dardanelles, and the longer he delayed the more French opinion began to swing against the Asiatic landing altogether. With Serbia falling, Salonika appeared to be the more crucial strategic point for a new offensive. In London, too, Lloyd George and Carson,28 the Attorney-General, were openly pushing their campaign against Kitchener, and the issue was rapidly narrowing down to a simple alternative: Salonika or Gallipoli, which was it to be? Hamilton’s army was now down to half its strength and the campaign was at a stalemate. Was it really worth while throwing good money after bad?

  On October 11 Kitchener felt bound to acknowledge the pressure of these questions. He cabled Hamilton, ‘What is your estimate of the probable losses which would be entailed to your force if the evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula was decided upon and carried out in the most careful manner? No decision has been arrived at yet on this question of evacuation, but I feel I ought to have your views.’

  When he read this Hamilton burst out, ‘If they do this they make the Dardanelles into the bloodiest tragedy of the world . . I won’t touch it.’ Could they not understand that the Turks were worn out, that the Allied soldiers were reviving now in the cooler weather, that they had only to be supported at Gallipoli and they would get through? And what if a gale came up half way through the evacuation? It might cause a disaster only equalled in history by that of the Athenians at Syracuse.

  The headquarters at Imbros was not the best of places in which to take calm decisions. Hamilton was suffering miserably from dysentery, and German aircraft had begun to raid the island. On this very day a quiverful of iron spikes had come rattling down about the General’s head.

  In the morning, however, he sent off a sober reply. They must reckon on the loss of half the men, and all their guns and stores, he said. ‘One quarter would probably get off quite easily, then the trouble would begin. We might be very lucky and lose considerably less than I have estimated. On the other hand, with all these raw troops at Suvla and all these Senegalese at Cape Helles, we might have a veritable catastrophe.’

  Privately Hamilton believed that the losses would be less than half—between 35 and 45 per cent. was his estimate—but his staff were in favour of the higher figure, and he adopted it to make his opposition to the evacuation absolutely clear. But there was more in Kitchener’s query than a balancing of estimates about evacuation: the whole question of Hamilton’s command was involved. Already there had been rumblings. On October 4 Kitchener had sent a private cable to Hamilton warning him that there had been a ‘flow of unofficial reports from Gallipoli’ adversely criticizing G.H.Q. at Imbros. Should they not make some changes, Kitchener suggested. Perhaps Braithwaite should come home.

  Hamilton had indignantly refused. But it was clear now that he himself and everyone on Imbros were under fire.

  Then on October 11, the same day that Kitchener had sent his cable about evacuation, the Dardanelles Committee approached the matter in an oblique but very definite way. They decided that reinforcements should be dispatched to the Near East, but they were not to go directly to Gallipoli; they were to be held in Egypt while a senior general, Haig or Kitchener himself—someone at any rate who was senior to Hamilton—went out and decided between Gallipoli and Salonika.

  The truth was that Hamilton was diminishing fast in everybody’s estimation. He was the general who always nearly succeeded. He had badly mismanaged Suvla, and General Stopford, who had recently come home, was making some very serious charges about the interference of G.H.Q. in the battle. The headquarters staff, Stopford wrote in a report to the War Office, ‘lived on an island at some distance from the peninsula’ and had been greatly misinformed about the Turkish strength at Suvla. There was another factor. Hamilton was Kitchener’s man, and it was beginning to seem that Kitchener might be covering him up. The Committee waited now with some impatience to see whether anything hopeful or useful would come in reply to Kitchener’s cable. It chanced, too, that just at this time the German zeppelins were having a particular success in their raids on London: 176 people had been killed in two successive nights. Between the falling bombs on London and the falling spikes on Imbros everybody’s nerves were on edge.

  But it was not the bombs, nor Stopford’s criticisms, not even the growing opposition to Kitc
hener and all his plans and protégés which was the immediate factor in the undoing of Hamilton’s reputation at this moment. It was an Australian journalist named Keith Murdoch. His entry into the explosive scene is one of the oddest incidents in the Gallipoli campaign.

  The trouble had begun far back in April with Ashmead-Bartlett, the war correspondent who represented the London press at the Dardanelles. According to Compton Mackenzie, who was in a position to know, Ashmead-Bartlett was not liked at headquarters. He was the stranger in the camp, a solitary civilian among professional and amateur soldiers. He was never captivated by Hamilton as the others were, but remained instead the detached hostile critic. He resented the censorship at G.H.Q., he disagreed with all their plans, and, worst of all, he was for ever predicting failure. Things grew to such a pitch that on one occasion, according to Mackenzie, the officers at Corps Headquarters at Cape Helles went into hiding in the rocks when Ashmead-Bartlett approached to avoid having to ask him to lunch.

  Despite its self-imposed discomfort and its devotion, Imbros was not a very inspiring place for an outsider. Of necessity it was a club. There was a disguised but inescapable atmosphere of privilege, of the old school and the old regiment, of breeding and manners. Hamilton found some of the most devoted of his admirers among the many young men of good family who as civilians had joined his staff. To strangers they sometimes conveyed an impression of superiority and complacency, and their good humour and politeness were often mistaken for dilettantism. No one questioned their courage; from Hamilton downwards senior officers made a point of deliberately and nonchalantly exposing themselves to enemy fire when they were at the front. Still, there was something lacking: a toughness, a roughness, the reassurance of the common touch. Among the troops it was rumoured that Hamilton wrote poetry in his spare time, and he was supposed to be very much under Braithwaite’s thumb. His charm, his integrity and his subtle intelligence were recognized by those who met him, but somehow these qualities did not work at a distance—and the soldiers were always at a distance. In brief, he seemed soft.