by Mark Baker
Ian Standish Monteith Hamilton was, in early 1915, perhaps the most distinguished and popular soldier in the British Army after Herbert Kitchener. He was also the most senior officer on the army’s active list. The German military high command had described him in 1914 as the most experienced soldier alive in any army, anywhere in the world.15 One of the first generation of senior British officers to earn rather than buy their commissions—graduating from the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, in 1870—Hamilton had fought with distinction through a series of colonial wars in India and across Africa. He was twice recommended for the Victoria Cross. It was denied the first time because he was considered too young; the second because he was judged too senior.
Hamilton had been wounded and taken prisoner during the Battle of Mujaba in South Africa in 1881, earning an audience with Queen Victoria on his return to London. During the Second Boer War he led an infantry column that fought a dozen major battles as it marched over 400 miles from Bloemfontein to Pretoria, a feat eulogised by correspondent Winston Churchill in his book Ian Hamilton’s March. By the end of the war, Hamilton was chief of staff to Kitchener, then commander of British forces in South Africa. On his return to London, he was feted as a national hero. Hundreds of thousands thronged Hyde Park in July 1902 for a homecoming procession and massed guard of honour in which Hamilton sat with Kitchener and General Sir John French in the first horse-drawn carriage. ‘London has cheered herself hoarse,’ reported The Sketch the next day. When Kitchener needed a skilled general to lead the Dardanelles operation, his old friend ‘Johnny’ Hamilton was an obvious choice. It was a prize appointment poisoned from the outset.
Hamilton was a general unlike any other of that time: an intellectual, a poet and a romantic. Some among his fellow senior officers saw these characteristics as signs of weakness. They were wrong; Hamilton was brave, tenacious and understood better than most that success in modern warfare required brains as well as brawn. He was, in 1915, probably as close to Kitchener as anyone in the British army but, like everyone else, he was in awe of the great man and recognised the limits of his ability to challenge the old warlord’s impulsive and often overbearing personality. Before being appointed to lead the Dardanelles expedition, Hamilton had command of the Central Striking Force, the three armies positioned defensively around London. His office was at the Horse Guards, just across the road from Kitchener’s vast apartment at the War Office. They met every day. ‘He used constantly to consult me and, as consistently, ignored my advice,’ Hamilton would later write. ‘In due course he packed me off to the Dardanelles. As he had given me this wonderful chance, my heart was full of gratitude.’16 Hamilton vowed to himself to renounce all correspondence with friends and well-wishers in power—‘for I knew that he would dislike that’—and to send Kitchener carbon copies of all the letters he wrote to Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. It was not an auspicious start for a relationship in which Hamilton would need to give tough and unpopular advice to his boss, and Kitchener would need to heed it.
Hamilton was given just 31 hours to embark on what was one of the most ambitious and risky assignments of World War I. The evening after the pre-emptory first meeting with Kitchener at which he was given his marching orders, the general left London with a small team of hastily appointed staff officers. Some of them had never been in uniform before; none was their leader’s choice. Their meagre kit included some travel guides, a three-year-old Turkish army handbook, a patchy pre-war report on Dardanelles defences, and an inaccurate map based on a French survey in 1854 (the French and British had not had access to the area since the Crimean War).
At the outset, the military operation was still envisioned merely as a backup to the primary naval operation. There were still strong hopes, despite the initial setbacks, that the ships would succeed in forcing their way through the Dardanelles. Hamilton arrived just in time to see those hopes dashed. On 18 March he stood watching from the decks of HMS Phaeton as the fleet of more than eighteen British and French warships began the main attack on the Turkish forts guarding The Narrows.
Vice Admiral John de Robeck, Carden’s replacement, launched the operation at 11.30 a.m. with four of the most powerful British ships—Queen Elizabeth, Agamemnon, Lord Nelson and Inflexible—standing off at 13,000 metres firing at the forts, while older ships with a screen of destroyers and minesweepers fired from closer range. The first barrages drew fierce return fire from the forts and heavy Turkish howitzers and field artillery concealed along the hills on both sides of the straits. After two hours, the Turkish response appeared to flag. Explosions were seen in two of the forts. De Robeck pressed the attack, ordering forward four old French battleships with a couple of British ships for close-quarters bombardment. Just before 2 p.m., with the forts largely silenced, the French-led ships were recalled. Then disaster struck.
As the battleships withdrew they moved into a bay where the straits widened to a distance of about 6 miles. De Robeck believed his minesweepers had successfully cleared the area, but a small Turkish minelayer under cover of darkness had earlier laid a string of twenty mines running parallel to the shore along the Asian coast—after the Turks had earlier observed Allied warships turning in this part of the bay. The first casualty was the French battleship Bouvet which was shaken by an immense explosion, capsized and sank within two minutes. Later in the afternoon two of the British ships, Irresistible and Ocean, struck mines and eventually sank and a third, Inflexible, was crippled and withdrawn from service. A total of 639 men drowned when the Bouvet sank. By the end of the day, another 70 men had been lost from the rest of the fleet.
There would be further proposals to ‘force the straits’ over the months ahead, but all came to nothing. Allied warships would not again venture into the Dardanelles in strength until the war was over. A land operation to capture the Gallipoli Peninsula and open the way for the navy was now imperative. And the burden of achieving the hugely ambitious objectives of the Dardanelles campaign now fell squarely on the shoulders of Johnny Hamilton.
6
Nell
She was beautiful, rich and admired at the highest levels of Egyptian society, but her life was beset by tragedy. Yet for a few months in 1915, as her country was buffeted by war, Nelly Rabinovitch’s private world was transformed by a chance meeting. In January, as the Ottoman forces launched their first raids on the Suez Canal zone, Nelly decided to move from her house at Helwan, on the southern outskirts of Cairo, to the relative safety of the Grand Continental Hotel in the centre of the city. She brought her two young daughters, Chickie and Sacha, with her. In the room next door was Phillip Schuler. A casual acquaintance would soon blossom into an intense love affair.
There was no shortage of suitors for the dark-haired, vivacious beauty. There were many young English officers, Egyptian artistocrats and even a prime minister who promised the little girls ponies that never arrived. English astronomer Langton Gregory was another. He would take the girls on the back of his motorcycle up to the observatory in the Mokattam Hills above Helwan. But Nelly, who had just turned 30—four years older than the dashing Australian correspondent—was soon smitten by his charm, his good looks and his tales of life in Australia. They would dine and dance together and attend parties and official functions. He would spend time with the girls, who were also enthralled by the young man from the strange land on the far side of the world. Late in their lives Sacha and Chickie still fondly remembered the Australian who came into their world ‘typing his cables in the room next to ours’ at the Grand Continental.
Nelly was the product of two proud and distinguished families. She was born Nelly Rossi. Her paternal grandfather was an eminent doctor, natural historian and sometime explorer who become personal physician to the Egyptian khedive. He was said to have been one of the first Jews in Egypt to be conferred the Ottoman title ‘Bey’ and the first to be permitted to visit the sacred Islamic cities of Mecca and Medina. Elia Rossi Bey had migrated to Egypt from the northern Italian city of Ferrara when
he completed his medical studies. After serving as a surgeon with the Egyptian army for several years, he joined Prince Halim Pasha on his 1856 expedition to explore the Sudan, sailing the Nile upstream of Khartoum. The prince became governor-general and his doctor stayed on in Khartoum for several years. The experience would produce Nubia and Sudan, one of ten books that traversed the doctor’s fascination with ethnography, zoology and medical science. He sent the natural history museum in hometown Ferrara a consignment of 70 zoological specimens and twelve boxes of insects. After his death in 1892, an obituary published in L’Univers Israelite would lament: ‘The Egyptian Institute and forty-five European Academies have just lost one of their most illustrious members who, for 50 years, has not ceased to enrich the sciences and the arts with his remarkable works.’
Elia Rossi Bey fathered ten children, one of whom was killed in the anti-European massacre that shook Alexandria in June 1882. His second son, Teophile, Nelly’s father, was a lawyer who would cement and extend the Rossi family’s place among the Egyptian elite by marrying Rachel Cattaui. The Cattauis were one of the wealthiest and most influential families in Egypt, a dynasty that traced its roots to the Middle Ages. Jacob Cattaui, Nelly’s grandfather, had been the khedive’s private banker, controller of the Egyptian mint and head of a financial empire that straddled Europe and the Middle East. He left a fortune in excess of five million pounds sterling when he died in 1883. Nelly’s uncle, Joseph Cattaui, founded the Bank of Egypt, would help negotiate Egyptian independence after World War I and would serve as finance minister in the mid-1920s. His wife Alice secured the place of Cattaui women in Egyptian high society which she graced with her charm and style. Alice had been a lady-in-waiting to Queen Nazli. Known as ‘Madam Cattaui Pasha’, she was said to have ‘wielded more influence among the courtiers than the Queen herself’.
As for the Cattaui women, they were the leaders and arbiters of the social scene. They attended glittering court balls, opera premieres and countless charity bazaars. In stark contrast to the traditionally-minded Egyptian upper class women, most of whom were never seen in public, early this century the Cattaui consorts were becoming an integral part of Cairo and Alexandria’s cosmopolitan societies enhanced by their European education and their emancipated upbringing.1
Into the rich ancestral heritage of the Rossis and the Cattauis stepped a dapper Russian interloper in 1907. The Rabinovitches were Ashkenazi Jews, successful tea merchants in the Black Sea port of Odessa. Adolph and Rachel Rabinovitch had three sons, two of whom became doctors. Alexis, the youngest, had studied medicine in Berlin before enlisting as a medical orderly in the Russo-Japanese war. While in the army, or perhaps earlier while he was a student, Alexis had contracted syphilis, the disease that would eventually drive him mad and bring on his early death. After leaving the army, and recovering his health, Alexis had decided to see the world before settling down. Early in his travels he stopped in Egypt and was enchanted by the then little township of Helwan. The local sulphur springs would persuade him that this was one of the healthiest places in the world; a place where he should stop a while and open a medical practice. Helwan had other compelling attractions. One night soon after his arrival Alexis attended a ball and danced most of the night with the glamorous daughter of an Italian lawyer.
The next morning she woke up with a bad attack of ‘flu’. The new Russian doctor was called, and soon the young couple were engaged. However, the prospective father-in-law insisted on a year’s moratorium, presumably to make sure there was no sign of the young doctor’s illness recurring. The year passed without mishap. The Wasserman syphilis test, to which he readily submitted, proved negative.2
Like many privileged young couples in the cosmopolitan Cairo of the early 1900s, Nelly and Alexis were Anglophiles. They decorated their new home with furniture ordered from Maples, a smart London department store. Their first child, born a year after the wedding, was named Vera but would be known throughout her life as Chickie. A governess was hired. Miss Ward was a middle-aged Englishwoman with a penchant for quoting from the Bible, Shakespeare and Dr Johnson. On a trip to show the child to her paternal grandparents in Odessa, Miss Ward asked whether she might teach Chickie to say her prayers at night when she grew older. ‘There is only one God,’ her father replied. ‘We are all free to worship Him in our own way.’ Alexis had converted to Islam and changed his name to Ali, to the consternation of his family and friends.
Nelly and Ali were a handsome couple, as the portrait taken on their wedding day—16 June 1908—attests. He is casually elegant in tails and a raffish silk tie, a flower in his lapel and a top hat on his knee. The 22-year-old bride radiates a fragile charm in a classical lace gown with a long veil. She leans close, his arm around her impossibly thin waist, trailing a bouquet in her left hand. Late in her life Chickie would meet an elderly Egyptian woman whose mother had known the couple well. ‘Ali and his wife were so beautiful, my mother told me, that when they made love the angels in heaven wept with joy,’ the old lady said.3
The young Russian doctor was soon as popular in Helwan as his pretty wife. He would often waive his fee for those patients who were too poor to pay. In December 1910 a second daughter was born. She was named Alexandra but would always be known as Sacha. Already the marriage was under serious strain as Ali’s health began to decline. His behaviour became erratic and sometimes alarming. During an argument with another doctor he pulled out a pistol and held it to the other man’s head. Returning by boat from a trip to France, he assaulted a stevedore. Increasingly worried by the deterioration in her husband’s mental condition, Nelly appealed for help to her brother-in-law in France.
Jacques Rabinovitch was twenty years older than his brother and had established a reputation as one of the leading psychiatrists in Paris. By 1914 he had become director of the Bicetre Hospital in the southern suburbs of the French capital. A former orphanage, prison and asylum—where the Marquis de Sade had been jailed for three years a century beforehand—the hospital was one of the first institutions to introduce humane methods for treating the mentally ill. Jacques Rabinovitch, who published a doctoral thesis on male hysteria in 1899, had become a pioneer in the treatment of mentally ill children. The tragedy of his distinguished career was that his own brother would become one of his most challenging patients.
Nelly’s eventual insistence that Ali be sent to Paris for treatment provoked serious strains within her family. Her father strongly disapproved, believing his daughter must take responsibility for the care of her husband. Jacques Rabinovitch also strongly disagreed with Nelly, for reasons that are unclear but may well have been influenced by the psychiatrist’s intimate knowledge of the grim consequences of committing patients to mental institutions in that era, even one as enlightened as his own. The dispute became so intense that Jacques would never speak to his sister-in-law again. But Nelly, adamant that her children must be protected, got her way. Jacques came to Cairo and took Ali back to Paris with him.
In the summer of 1914, Nelly took the girls to visit their father in Paris. War was rapidly approaching and the journey was suffused with foreboding. A strange darkness fell over the city and the shops put their lights on in full daylight. One night, Chickie, who had just turned five, was awakened by what she thought was a storm. It was not thunder, her nanny said, but the guns at Calais. When they reached the hospital it was beginning to fill with Belgian refugees. Sacha recalled the family’s reunion:
We were in Paris with searchlights scouring the sky for enemy planes. We were taken to see our father and there was a kind matron called Mlle Bazin. My father rushed downstairs to meet us and lifted mummy right up in his arms. Then I sat on his knee and he gave me a plaster-of-Paris lamb with all the Allied flags stuck in it.4
Ali’s condition had worsened, but he was well enough to go out to lunch with them and accompany them back to their hotel. They departed hurriedly by train for the return journey to Cairo via Italy. As their ship pulled out of Naples they passed a German vess
el engulfed in flames. It was the last time any of them would see Ali. He died a few months later. The sadness of the two young girls would endure to the end of their own lives. In her 70s, Sacha wrote a poem, My Father:
He came from a far country,
Handsome and dark and tall,
His pockets full of roubles,
the best man of them all.
He came from a cold country
To the desert and the sun,
Settled and had two daughters,
I was the younger one.
He was gone before I knew him,
He was gone out of his mind,
Then off to die in Paris.
In the home he left behind
One room was never opened:
‘That is your father’s room.’
His coats hung in the cupboard
In naphthalene and gloom.
One question was not answered.
When asked how father died:
‘He had some kind of fever . . .’
Mother and nurses lied.
But: ‘Your father was a madman,
Your father who is dead,
Your father was a lunatic.’
Our little playmates said.5
Nelly wore black and mourned her husband. But the truth was his madness had brought their marriage to a practical end long before the final news of Ali’s death reached Cairo. They had been apart for a year with no hope that they would ever be reunited in health and happiness. It would not be long before Nelly was again the focus of admiring young men—and back reciprocating their attentions on the Cairo social circuit, her girls left happily in the care of governess Miss Ward, lady’s maid Netta and the other household staff.