John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works

by Philip Errington

  This change in the strategical scheme was made after we were committed to the venture; it made a profound difference to our position. Unfortunately we were so deeply engaged in other theatres that it was impossible to change our plans as swiftly and as profoundly as our chances. The great reserve could not be sent when it became necessary, early in May, nor for more than two months. Until it came, it happened, time after time, that even when we fought and beat back the Turks they could be reinforced before we could. All through the campaign we fought them and beat them back, but always, on the day after the battle, they had a division of fresh men to put in to the defence, while we, who had suffered more, being the attackers, had but a handful with which to follow up the success.

  People have said: “But you could have kept fresh divisions in reserve as easily as the Turks. Why did you not send more men, so as to have them ready to follow up a success?” I could never answer this question. It is the vital question. The cry for “fifty thousand more men and plenty of high-explosive” went up daily from every trench in Gallipoli, and we lost the campaign through not sending them in time. On the spot, of course, our Generals knew that war (like life) consists of a struggle with disadvantages, and their struggle with these was a memorable one. Only, when all was done, their situation remained that of the Frank rearguard in the “Song of Roland.” In that poem the Franks could and did beat the Saracens, but the Saracens brought up another army before the Franks were reinforced. The Franks could and did beat that army, too, but the Saracens brought up another army before the Franks were reinforced. The Franks could and did beat that army, too, but then they were spent, and Roland had to sound his horn, and Charlemagne would not come to the summons of the horn, and the heroes were abandoned in the dolorous pass.

  Summer came upon Gallipoli with a blinding heat only comparable to New York in July. The flowers which had been so gay with beauty in the Helles fields in April soon wilted to stalks. The great slope of Cape Helles took on a savage and African look of desolation. The air quivered over the cracking land. In the blueness of the heat haze the graceful, terrible hills looked even more gentle and beautiful than before; and one who was there said that “there were little birds that droned, rather like the English yellow-hammers.” With the heat, which was a new experience to all the young English soldiers there, came a plague of flies beyond all record and belief. Men ate and drank flies; the filthy insects were everywhere. The ground in places was so dark with them, that one could not be sure whether the patches were ground or flies. Our camps and trenches were kept clean; they were well-scavenged daily. But only a few yards away were the Turk trenches, which were invariably filthy: there the flies bred undisturbed, perhaps encouraged. There is a fine modern poem which speaks of the Indian sun in summer as “the blazing death star.” Men in Gallipoli in the summer of 1915 learned to curse the sun as an enemy more cruel than the Turk. With the sun and the plague of flies came the torment of thirst, one of the greatest torments which life has the power to inflict.

  At Cape Helles, in the summer, there was a shortage, but no great scarcity, of water, for the Turk wells supplied more than half the army, and less than half the water needed had to be brought from abroad. At Anzac, however, there was always a scarcity, for even in the spring not more than a third of the water needed could be drawn from wells. At first water could be found by digging shallow pans in the beach, but this method failed when the heats began. Two-thirds (or more) of the water needed at Anzac had always to be brought from abroad, and to bring this two-thirds regularly and land it and store it under shellfire was a difficult task. “When operations were on,” as in the August battle, the difficulty of distribution was added to the other difficulties, and then, indeed, want of water brought our troops to death’s door. At Anzac, “when operations were on,” even in the intensest heat the average ration of water for all purposes was, perhaps, at most, a pint and a half, sometimes only a pint. And though this extremity was as a rule only reached “when operations were on,” that is, when there was heavy fighting, then the need was greatest.

  In peace, in comfortable homes and in cool weather, civilized people need or consume a little less than three pints of liquid in each day. In hot weather and when doing severe bodily labour they need more, perhaps half a gallon in the day. Thirst, which most of us know solely as a pleasant zest to drinking, soon becomes a hardship, then, in an hour, an obsession, and by high noon a madness, to those who toil in the sun with nothing to drink. Possibly to most of the many thousands who were in the Peninsula last summer the real enemies were not the Turks, but the sun in heaven, shaking “the pestilence of his light,” and thirst that withered the heart and cracked the tongue.

  Some have said to me: “Yes, but the Turks must have suffered, too, just as much, in that waterless ground.” It is not so. The Turks at Cape Helles held the wells at Krithia; inland from Anzac they held the wells near Lonesome Pine and Koja Dere. They had other wells at Maidos and Gallipoli. They had always more water than we, and (what is more) the certainty of it. Most of them came from lands with little water and great heat, ten (or more) degrees farther to the south than any part of England. Heat and thirst were old enemies to them; they were tempered to them. Our men had to serve an apprenticeship to them, and pay for what they learned in bodily hardship. Not that our men minded hardship. They did not; they were volunteers who had chosen their fate and were there of their own choice, and no army in the world has ever faced suffering more cheerily. But this hardship of thirst was a weight upon them throughout the summer; like malaria, it did not kill, but it lowered all vitality. It halved the possible effort of men always too few for the work in hand. Let it now double the honour paid to them.

  In the sandy soil of the Peninsula were many minute amœbæ, which played their part in the summer suffering. In the winds of the great droughts of July and August the dust blew about our positions like smoke from burning hills. It fell into food and water, and was eaten and drunk (like the flies) at each meal. Within the human body the amœbæ of the sand set up symptoms like those of dysentery, as a rule slightly less severe than the true dysentery of camps. After July nearly every man in our army in Gallipoli suffered from this evil. Like the thirst, it lowered more vitality than it destroyed. Many died, it is true, but then nearly all were ill; it was the universal sickness, not the occasional death, that mattered.

  Pass now to the position of affairs at the end of June. We were left to our own strength in this struggle. The Turks were shaken; it was vital to our chances to attack again before they recovered. We had not the men to attack again, but they were coming, and were due in a few weeks’ time. While they were on their way the question how to use them was considered.

  As the army’s task was to help the fleet through the Narrows, it had to operate in the south-western portion of the Peninsula. Further progress against Achi Baba in the Helles sector was hardly possible; for the Turks had added too greatly to their trenches there since the attacks of April and May. Operations on the Asian coast were hardly possible without a second army; operations against Bulair were not likely to help the fleet. Operations in the Anzac sector offered better chances of success. It was hoped that a thrust south-eastward from Anzac might bring our men across to the Narrows or to the top of the ridges which command the road to Constantinople. It was reasonable to think that such a thrust; backed up by a new landing in force to the north, in Suvla Bay, might turn the Turkish right and destroy it. If the men at Helles attacked, to contain the Turks in the south, and the men on the right of Anzac attacked, to hold the Turks at Anzac, it was possible that men on the left of Anzac, backed up by a new force marching from Suvla, might give a decisive blow. The Turk position on the Peninsula roughly formed a letter L. The plan (as it shaped) was to attack the horizontal line at Cape Helles, press the centre of the vertical line at Anzac, and bend back, crumple, and break the top of the vertical line between the Anzac position and Suvla. At the same time Suvla Bay was to be seized and prepared as
a harbour at which supplies might be landed, even in the stormy season.

  Some soldier has said, that “the simple thing is the difficult thing.” The idea seems simple to us, because the difficulty has been cleared away for us by another person’s hard thought. Such a scheme of battle, difficult to think out in the strain of holding on and under the temptation to go slowly, improving what was held, was also difficult to execute. Very few of the great battles of history, not even those in Russia, in Manchuria, and in the Virginian Wilderness have been fought on such difficult ground, under such difficult conditions.

  The chosen battlefield (the south-western end of the Peninsula) has already been described; the greater part of it consists of the Cape Helles and Anzac positions, but the vital or decisive point, where, if all went well, the Turk right was to be bent back, broken and routed, lies to the north of Anzac, on the spurs and outlying bastions of Sari Bair.

  Suvla Bay, where the new landing was to take place, lies three miles to the north of Anzac. It is a broad, rather shallow, semicircular bay, open to the west and south-west, with a partly practicable beach, some of it (the southern part) fairly flat and sandy, the rest steepish and rocky, though broken by creeks. Above it, one on the north, one on the south horn of the bay, rise two small low knolls or hillocks known as Ghazi Baba and Lala Baba, the latter a clearly marked tactical feature. To the north, beyond the horn of the bay, the coast is high, steep-to sandy cliff, broken with gullies and washed by deep water; but to the south, all the way to Anzac, the coast is a flat, narrow, almost straight sweep of sandy shore shutting a salt marsh and a couple of miles of lowland from the sea; it is a lagoon beach of the common type, with the usual feature of shallow water in the sea that washes it. The northern half of this beach is known as Beach C, the southern as Beach B.

  Viewed from the sea, the coast chosen for the new landing seems comparatively flat and gentle, seemingly, though not really, easy to land upon, but with no good military position near it. It looks as though once, long ago, the sea had thrust far inland there, in a big bay or harbour stretching from the high ground to the north of Suvla to the left of the Anzac position. This bay, if it ever existed, must have been four miles long and four miles across, a very noble space of water, ringed by big, broken, precipitous hills, into which it thrust in innumerable creeks and combes. Then (possibly), in the course of ages, silt brought down by the torrents choked the bay, and pushed the sea farther and farther back, till nothing remained of the harbour but the existing Suvla Bay and the salt marsh (dry in summer). The hills ringing Suvla Bay and this flat or slightly rising expanse, which may once have been a part of it, stand (to the fancy) like a rank that has beaten back an attack. They are high and proud to the north; they stand in groups in the centre; but to the south, where they link onto the broken cliffs of the Anzac position, they are heaped in tumbling, precipitous, disordered bulges of hill, cut by every kind of cleft and crumpled into every kind of fold, as though the dry land had there been put to it to keep out the sea. These hills are the scene of the bitterest fighting of the battle.

  Although these hills in the Suvla district stand in a rank, yet in the centre of the rank there are two gaps where the ancient harbour of our fancy thrusts creeks far inland. These gaps or creeks open a little to the south of the north and south limits of Suvla Bay. They are watered, cultivated valleys with roads or tracks in them. In the northern valley is a village of some sixty houses, called Anafarta Sagir, or Little Anafarta. In the southern valley is a rather larger village of some ninety houses, called Biyuk Anafarta, or Great Anafarta. The valleys are called after these villages.

  Between these valleys is a big blunt-headed jut or promontory of higher ground, which thrusts out towards the bay. At the Suvla end of this jut, about one thousand yards from the bight of the Salt Marsh, it shoots up in three peaks or top-knots, two of them united in the lump called Chocolate Hill, the other known as Scimitar Hill or Hill 70; all, roughly, one hundred and fifty feet high. About a mile directly inland from Chocolate Hill is a peak of about twice the height, called Ismail Oglu Tepe, an abrupt and savage heap of cliff, dented with chasms, harshly scarped at the top, and covered with dense thorn scrub. This hill is the southernmost feature in the northern half of the battlefield. The valley of Great Anafarta, which runs east and west below it, cuts the battlefield in two.

  The southern side of the Great Anafarta valley is just that disarrangement of precipitous bulged hill which rises and falls in crags, peaks, and gullies all the way from the valley to Anzac. Few parts of the earth can be more broken and disjointed than this mass of precipice, combes, and ravines. A savage climate has dealt with it since the beginning of time, with great heats, frosts, and torrents. It is not so much a ridge or chain of hills as the manifold outlying bastions and buttresses of Sari Bair, from which they are built out in craggy bulges parted by ravines. It may be said that Sari Bair begins at Gaba Tepe (to the south of the Anzac position), and stretches thence north-easterly towards Great Anafarta in a rolling and confused five miles of hill that has all the features of a mountain. It is not high. Its peaks range from about two hundred and fifty to six hundred feet; its chief peak (Koja Chemen Tepe) is a little more than nine hundred feet. Nearly all of it is trackless, waterless, and confused, densely covered with scrub (sometimes with forest), littered with rocks, an untamed savage country. The south-western half of it made the Anzac position; the north-eastern and higher half was the prize to be fought for.

  It is the watershed of that part of the Peninsula. The gullies on its south side drain down to the Hellespont; those upon its north side drain to the flat land which may once have been submerged as a part of Suvla Bay. These northern gullies are great, savage, irregular gashes or glens running westerly or north-westerly from the hill bastions. Three of them, the three nearest to the northern end of the Anzac position, may be mentioned by name: Sazli Beit Dere, Chailak Dere, and Aghyl Dere. The word Dere means watercourse; but all three were bone dry in August when the battle was fought. It must be remembered that in the trackless Peninsula a watercourse of this kind is the nearest approach to a road, and (to a military force) the nearest approach to a covered way. All these three Deres lead up the heart of the hills to those highlands of Sari Bair where we wished to plant ourselves. From the top of Sari Bair one can look down on the whole Turkish position facing Anzac, and see that position not only dominated, but turned and taken in reverse. One can see, only three miles away, the only road to Constantinople, and, five miles away, the little port of Maidos near the Narrows. To us the taking of Sari Bair meant the closing of that road to the passing of Turk reinforcements and the opening of the Narrows to the fleet. It meant victory, and the beginning of the end of this great war, with home and leisure for life again, and all that peace means. Knowing this, our soldiers made a great struggle for Sari Bair, but Fate turned the lot against them. Sari was not to be an English hill, though the flowers on her sides will grow out of English dust forever. Those who lie there thought, as they fell, that over their bodies our race would pass to victory. It may be that their spirits linger there at this moment, waiting for the English bugles and the English singing, and the sound of the English ships passing up the Hellespont.

  Among her tumble of hills, from the Anzac position to Great Anafarta, Sari Bair thrusts out several knolls, peaks, and commanding heights. Within the Anzac position is the little plateau of Lone or Lonesome Pine, to be described later. Farther to the north-east are the heights known as Baby 700 and Battleship Hill, and beyond these, still farther to the north-east, the steep peak of Chunuk Bair. All of these before this battle were held by the Turks, whose trenches defended them. Lone Pine is about four hundred feet high, the others rather more, slowly rising as they go north-east, but keeping to about the height of the English Chilterns. Chunuk Bair, the highest of these, is about seven hundred and fifty feet. Beyond Chunuk, half a mile farther to the north-east, is Hill Q, and beyond Hill Q a very steep, deep gully, above which rises the beautiful
peak, the summit of Sari, known as Koja Chemen Tepe. One or two Irish hills in the wilder parts of Antrim are like this peak, though less fleeced with brush. In height, as I have said, it is a little more than nine hundred feet, or about the height of our Bredon Hill. One point about it may be noted. It thrusts out a great spur or claw for rather more than a mile due north; this spur, which is much gullied, is called Abd-el-Rahman Bair.

  For the moment Chunuk Bair is the most important point to remember, because –

  (a) It was the extreme right of the prepared Turk position.

  (b) The three Deres previously mentioned have their sources at its foot and start there, like three roads starting from the walls of a city on their way to the sea. They lead past the hills known as Table Top and Rhododendron Spur. Close to their beginnings, at the foot of Chunuk, is a building known as the Farm, round which the fighting was very fierce.

  The “idea” or purpose of the battle was “to endeavour to seize a position across the Gallipoli Peninsula from Gaba Tepe to Maidos, with a protected line of supply from Suvla Bay.”

  The plan of the attack was, that a strong force in Anzac should endeavour to throw back the right wing of the Turks, drive them south towards Kilid Bahr, and thus secure a position commanding the narrow part of the Peninsula.