The attack began with the heaviest artillery bombardment of the campaign, and it went on steadily for four and a half hours. There was a lull for a few minutes and then it recommenced. In the British trenches the Soldiers waited for the inevitable rush that would follow the bombardment; and in the early evening it began. The Turkish infantry had a hundred yards or more to go before they reached the first British trenches, and they jumped up with their old cries of Allah, Allah, and Voor, Voor—strike, strike. Perhaps there was something of desperation in the answering fire of the British defence. It was so murderous, so concentrated and steady, that when only a few minutes had gone by the soldiers saw a thing which had scarcely ever happened before—the Turkish infantry were refusing to charge. Their officers could be seen shouting and striking at the men, urging them up and out into the open where so many were already dead. But the men would not move. By nightfall it was all over. Not a single enemy soldier had broken into the British lines.
Liman admits that this disastrous attack convinced him that the British were not going to evacuate Cape Helles after all, and nothing further was done to molest them all through that night and the following day.
There were now just 17,000 men left, and January 8 was another calm spring-like day. Once again as at Suvla and Anzac great piles of stores and ammunition were got ready for destruction. Landmines were laid, and the self-firing rifles set in position in the trenches. Once again the sad mules lay dead in rows.
During the day the wind shifted round to the south-west and freshened a little, but it was still calm when at dusk the long lines of boats and warships set out for the peninsula for the last time. From Clapham Junction, from the Vineyard and Le Haricot, and the other famous places which soon would not even be mentioned on the maps, the men came marching to the sea, a distance of three miles or so.
The thing that the soldiers afterwards remembered with particular vividness was the curious alternation of silence and of deafening noise that went on through the day. At Sedd-el-Bahr they crouched under the comer of the battered fort waiting for their turn to embark, and in the overwhelming stillness of their private fear they heard nothing but the footfall of the men who had gone ahead; the clop, clop, clop of their boots as they ran across the pontoons to the River Clyde where lighters were waiting to embark them. Then, in an instant, all was dissolved in the shattering explosion of enemy shells erupting in the sea. Then again the clop, clop, clop of the boots as the line of running men took up its course again. To see safety so near and to know that with every second it might be lost—this was the hardest trial of all to bear, and it crushed the waiting soldier with nightmares of loneliness.
Apart from the spasmodic shelling there was no movement in the Turkish lines, and as the night advanced the Turks very largely ceased to count; it was the weather which engrossed everybody’s mind. By 8 p.m. the glass was falling, and at nine when the waning moon went down the wind had risen to thirty-five miles an hour. The River Clyde held firmly enough—all through these nights the men had been passing under her lee to the boats—but the crazy piers in the bay strained and groaned as heavy seas came smashing up against them. Soon an alarm went up. Two lighters broke adrift and crashed through the flimsy timber. All further embarkation then was stopped while a gang of engineers, working in the black and icy sea, put things to rights again. Then when another 3,000 men had been got off the pier collapsed once more, and again there was another hour’s delay.
By midnight when the last troops began to leave the trenches on their long walk to the shore the wind was rising with every minute that went by, and in the starlight there was nothing to be seen at sea but a waste of racing water. Two white rockets went up from the battleship Prince George—the signal that she was being attacked by a submarine. Two thousand men had just got aboard the ship, and de Robeck and Keyes in the Chatham rushed towards her. But it was nothing—the vessel had merely bumped some wreckage in the water.
Now everything depended upon the speed with which the last men could be got away. At 2 a.m. 3,200 still remained. Through the next hour most of them managed to reach the boats, and barely 200 were then waiting to be embarked. These, however, were in a critical situation. Under the charge of General Maude, the commander of the 13th Division who had insisted on being among the last to leave, they had made their way to Gully Beach, an isolated landing place on the west coast, only to find that the lighter which was to take them off had run aground. By now the trenches had been empty for two and a half hours, and it was apparent that they could not stay where they were. One hope remained: to march on another two miles to ‘W’ beach at the tip of the peninsula on the chance that they might still be in time to find another boat. They set off soon after 2 a.m. and had been on the road for some ten minutes when the General discovered with consternation that his valise had been left behind on the stranded lighter. Nothing, he announced, would induce him to leave without it, and so while the rest of the column went on he turned back with another officer to Gully Beach. Here they retrieved the lost valise, and placing it on a wheeled stretcher set off once more along the deserted shore. Meanwhile the others had reached ‘W’ beach, where the last barge was waiting to push off. They felt, however, that they could not leave until the General arrived—a decision which required some courage, for the storm had now risen to half a gale, and the main ammunition dump, the fuse of which had already been lighted, was due to explode in under half an hour.37 After twenty minutes the commander of the boat announced that he could wait no more; in another five minutes all further embarkation would become impossible. It was at this moment that the General emerged from the darkness with his companion and came trundling his valise down the pier.
It was just a quarter to four in the morning when they pushed off, and ten minutes later the first of the ammunition dumps went up with a colossal roar. As the soldiers and sailors in the last boats looked back towards the shore they saw hundreds of red rockets going up from Achi Baba and the cliffs in Asia, and immediately afterwards Turkish shells began to burst and crash along the beach. The fire in the burning dumps of stores took a stronger hold, and presently all the sky to the north was reddened with a false dawn. Not a man had been left behind.
It had been a fantastic, an unbelievable success, a victory of a sort at a moment when hope itself had almost gone. Decorations were awarded to General Monro and his chief-of-staff who had so firmly insisted upon the evacuation.
No special medal, however, was given to the soldiers who fought in the Gallipoli campaign.
EPILOGUE
‘You will hardly fade away until the sun fades out of the sky and the earth sinks into the universal blackness. For already you form part of that great tradition of the Dardanelles which began with Hector and Achilles. In another few thousand years the two stories will have blended into one, and whether when “the iron roaring went up to the vault of heaven through the unharvested sky”, as Homer tells us, it was the spear of Achilles or whether it was a 100-lb shell from Asiatic Annie won’t make much odds to the Almighty.’
GENERAL HAMILTON in a preface addressed to the Gallipoli soldiers.
THE war never returned to Gallipoli. Soon after the campaign most of the Turkish soldiers were removed to other fronts, and within a few years nearly all the debris of the battlefield had been taken away.38 In successive winter storms the remnants of the wharves and jetties were destroyed, and the trenches in the hills above fell in upon themselves and lost all pattern. Already by 1918 a thick growth of camel thorn and wild thyme, of saltbush and myrtle, had covered the scarred ground where for nine months there had been nothing but dust or mud.
On January 20, 1918, the Goeben emerged at last. Shortly before dawn she came out of the straits with the Breslau and headed through the Ægean towards Imbros. For two years a British flotilla had been waiting there for just this opportunity, but it chanced that the Lord Nelson and the Agamemnon, the only two ships which were capable of sinking the Goeben, were away at Salonika that day; a
nd so it was left to a group of destroyers and monitors to engage. They had very little chance. The monitor Raglan and another British ship soon went down, and for the Germans it might have been a supremely successful day had they not run on to a minefield off Imbros. The Breslau sank instantly, and the Goeben with a hole in her side struggled back to the Narrows where she beached herself. The vessel was repeatedly attacked from the air during the next few days, but she managed to right herself and escaped to Constantinople. Under the name of Yavus she is still serving with the Turkish Fleet.
Had the war continued into 1919 the British Fleet would have made another attempt to force the Dardanelles. In 1918 Admiral Wemyss had been installed as First Sea Lord, and Keyes was in command of the Dover Patrol. They had obtained the cabinet’s consent to the new assault, and were actually engaged in assembling the ships when they were forestalled by the Armistice. It was signed with the Turks in the harbour of Mudros on October 30, 1918, twelve days before the cessation of hostilities in France. A fortnight later an Allied flotilla steamed up the Dardanelles, a long grey line of silent ships watched silently by the Turkish gunners on the cliffs, and an occupation force was put ashore.
Talaat and Enver did not wait for the end. Shortly before the Armistice they were ousted by a provisional government, and while all the waterfront at Constantinople was hung with Greek flags in expectation of the arrival of the Allied Fleet they fled to Germany. Talaat made his home under another name in Berlin, and from there in 1921 he sent a message to Aubrey Herbert in England suggesting that they should meet. The rendezvous took place at Hamm in Germany, and Talaat proposed an Anglo-Turkish alliance. He agreed that he had made mistakes—that the Young Turks should never have joined the Germans—but that, he said, was past and done with; the important thing was that Britain was losing everything she had gained in Turkey by failing to come to an agreement with Mustafa Kemal.
The two men talked at great length, and it did not seem to Herbert that Talaat, even in these circumstances when his voice could only be a voice in a void, was absurd or even particularly pathetic. He was thinner and he was obviously poor, but the shrewdness remained, the hardness and the subtlety. Herbert said he could do no more than report to the Foreign Office, and Talaat went off in the Berlin train.
Talaat was wrong in one important aspect of his argument, for the past was not nearly done with yet. A few days later he felt a tap on his shoulder as he was walking in the street in Berlin, and turning round he saw the strained white face of a young Armenian student. This boy, Solomon Telririam by name, was in that instant the apotheosis of the ruined Armenian race. As a child he had seen his father stripped and murdered by the Turks, his mother and sisters put on the road for the Mesopotamian desert only to be raped and butchered by their guards. Someone had picked him up unconscious from the ground, and somehow he had made his way through Russia to Berlin. There, he said later, he had a vision: his mother was standing over him saying, ‘You know Talaat is here. But you seem quite heartless and are not my son.’ And now in the street, having looked for a second into the gypsy face, the boy took a revolver from his pocket and blew out Talaat’s brains.
Both Liman, who was now living in retirement in Germany, and Talaat’s widow gave evidence at the trial—Liman to defend the reputation of himself and the German soldiers who were in Turkey at the time of the Armenian massacres, and the widow to plead for her husband’s name. Yet no one had the ghost of a chance of exonerating Talaat on this issue. One of the telegrams sent to a provincial Turkish commander was read in court. The officer had asked for the name of the place to which he was to send the Armenians whom he had rounded up. Talaat replied, ‘The place where they are being sent to is nowhere.’
Enver too had set out for Germany at the collapse in 1918, and soon after he was gone he was condemned to death in Constantinople. He made his way across the Black Sea to Odessa, and thence overland through the chaos of the Balkans to Berlin. He soon grew tired of the wretched life of a refugee in a defeated capital, and in 1919 he returned to Russia to try his fortune with the Soviets. For a while he was with General Denikin in the struggle for the independence of the Caucasus, but when Denikin negotiated with the Allies he went to Azerbaijan. During 1920 and 1921 he was employed at Moscow as the director of the Asiatic department of the Soviet government, and he attended a conference at Baku as the leader of the communist movement in the Middle East. From this point on the story grows obscure; he was constantly reported dead only to appear again. In the end, however, it appears that he turned against the Russians, and he is said to have met his death leading a cavalry charge against them in the mountains of Russian Turkestan in 1922. He was then in his early forties.
Liman remained in command of the Turkish Army on the southern front in Syria until he was defeated by Allenby in 1918, when he handed over the command to Kemal and returned to Constantinople. There he surrendered to the Allies, and was interned in Malta until the summer of 1919. In the ten years that were left to him (he was already sixty at Gallipoli), he enjoyed a dignified and respected retirement, and the private rages which, one feels, lie just below the surface in such a controlled character were his own affair. He died a few years before Hitler came to power and left a name as a military strategist which was hardly less admired in Britain than it was in Germany.
Of Kemal’s own fabulous rise to power there are of course very full accounts, but perhaps his first triumphs at the Dardanelles were as important to him as any others. When towards the end of the campaign he arrived in Constantinople ill and exhausted not even Enver’s opposition could prevent the Turkish newspapers from greeting him as ‘The Saviour of Gallipoli’.
In August 1916 a Royal Commission was set up in London to investigate the Gallipoli campaign. General Monro, who was then on his way to India to become Commander-in-Chief, was the first witness, and in the ensuing year nearly 200 others were called to give evidence: Churchill and Hamilton, de Robeck and Keyes, Stopford and Fisher, all the generals and admirals, and finally the War correspondents, Nevinson, Ashmead-Bartlett and Murdoch. Kitchener, who by then was dead,39 was the only major figure who did not put his case. At the end of 1917 the Commission’s report came out, and it stated its general conclusions very clearly: ‘ . . . from the outset the risks of failure attending the enterprise outweighed its chances of success.’ General Monro was congratulated upon the evacuation: it was, the Commission said, ‘a wise and courageous decision.’
Dealing with the Suvla landing, the Commissioners expressed the view that General Stopford might have kept in closer touch with his troops, but Hamilton, they thought, had only increased his difficulties by intervening on August 8. ‘We regard the intervention,’ the report stated, ‘as well-intentioned but injudicious.’ In short, the general conclusion was that the campaign was a mistake, and that even with better luck and better management, it could hardly have succeeded.
In 1917 the Dardanelles Commissioners were not ideally placed for taking an historical view of the campaign, for there was then still another year of trench warfare to be fought in France, and the Russian revolution had not yet taken its full effect; and so it may not have been altogether apparent then that there were worse things in the world than the loss of half a dozen old battleships in the Dardanelles, or the weakening of the French front by a few extra divisions which might have made all the difference at Gallipoli.
It was apparent only that the Allies had been incomparably the losers. During the 259 days that elapsed between the first landings in April 1915 and the final withdrawal in January 1916 they sent half a million men to Gallipoli, and slightly more than half of these became casualties. There is some doubt about the exact number of the Turkish losses, but they are officially computed at 251,000, which is just one thousand less than those suffered by the Allies; and this perhaps is the best indication of how closely the struggle was fought.40
As for the strategic consequences of the defeat, they scarcely bore thinking about. Twenty Turkish division
s were set free to attack Russia and to threaten Egypt. All contact with Russia and Rumania was lost, and the war dragged on in the Near East for another three years while another Allied army, infinitely greater in size than the one employed at Gallipoli, slowly and painfully made good the ground that had been lost. Before the Ottoman Empire fell in 1918 nearly three-quarters of a million Allied soldiers were sent to Salonika, and another 280,000 fought their way northwards across the desert from Egypt to Jerusalem and Damascus. Except for the Anzac troops none of the men who were evacuated from Gallipoli were ever employed against the Germans as General Monro had hoped they would be; they remained in the East until the end of the war.
The campaign had been a mighty destroyer of reputations. When Kitchener returned to England at the end of 1915 he was forced to reinstate the General Staff in the War Office, and he was no longer a semi-dictatorial figure in the cabinet. He was sixty-five, Gallipoli seemed to have deprived him of his old oracular powers of taking decisions, and Lloyd George, Bonar Law and others began a concerted move to get him out. At his death six months later his influence was rapidly falling away. In the years that followed it was demonstrated over and over again in many books that the sinking of the Hampshire had saved Kitchener from a sad and inevitable decline. Yet he was so revered by the public in England that for a long time people simply could not bring themselves to believe that he was dead, and there was a persistent rumour that he was a prisoner of the Germans.
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