John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works

by Philip Errington

  Meanwhile a large body of troops should secure Suvla, and another large body, landing at Suvla, should clear away any Turkish forces on the hills between the Anafarta valleys, and then help the attacking force from Anzac by storming Sari Bair from the north and west.

  The 6th of August was fixed for the first day of the attack from Anzac; the landing at Suvla was to take place during the dark hours of the night of the 6th – 7th. “The 6th was both the earliest and the latest date possible for the battle – the earliest, because it was the first by which the main part of the reinforcements would be ready; the latest, because of the moon.” Both in the preparation and the surprise of this attack dark nights were essential.

  Sir Ian Hamilton’s despatch (reprinted from the London Gazette of Tuesday, the 4th of January, 1916) shows that this battle of the 6th to 10th August was perhaps the strangest and most difficult battle ever planned by mortal General. It was to be a triple battle, fought by three separated armies, not in direct communication with each other. There was no place from which the battle, as a whole, could be controlled nearer than the island of Imbros (fourteen miles from any part of the Peninsula), to which telegraphic cables led from Anzac and Cape Helles. The left wing of our army, designed for the landing at Suvla, was not only not landed, when the battle began, but not concentrated. There was no adjacent subsidiary base big enough (or nearly big enough) to hold it. “On the day before the battle, part were at Imbros, part at Mudros, and part at Mitylene, . . . separated respectively by fourteen, sixty, and one hundred and twenty miles of sea from the arena into which they were simultaneously to appear.” The vital part of the fight was to be fought by troops from Anzac. The Anzac position was an open book to every Turk aeroplane and every observer on Sari Bair. The reinforcements for this part of the battle had to be landed in the dark, some days before the battle, and kept hidden underground, during daylight, so that the Turks should not see them and suspect what was being planned.

  In all wars, but especially in modern wars, great tactical combinations have been betrayed by very little things. In war, as in life, the unusual thing, however little, betrays the unusual thing, however great. An odd bit of paper round some cigars betrayed the hopes of the American Secession; some litter in the sea told Nelson where the French fleet was; one man rising up in the grass by a roadside saved the wealth of Peru from the hands of Drake. The Turks were always expecting an attack from Anzac. It is not too much to say that they searched the Anzac position hourly for the certain signs of an attack, reinforcements, and supplies. They had not even to search the whole position for these signs, since there was only one place (towards Fisherman’s Hut) where they could be put. If they had suspected that men and stores were being landed, they would have guessed at once that a thrust was to be made, and our attacks upon their flanks would have met with a prepared defence.

  It was vital to our chance of success that nothing unusual, however little, should be visible in Anzac from the Turk positions during the days before the battle. One man staring up at an aeroplane would have been evidence enough to a quick observer that there was a newcomer on the scene. One new water-tank, one new gun, one mule not yet quiet from the shock of landing, might have betrayed all the adventure. Very nearly thirty thousand men, one whole division and one brigade of English soldiers, and a brigade of Gurkhas, with their guns and stores, had to be landed unobserved and hidden.

  There was only one place in which they could be hidden, and that was under the ground. The Australians had to dig hiding-places for them before they came.

  In this war of digging, the daily life in the trenches gives digging enough to every soldier. Men dig daily even if they do not fight. At Anzac in July the Australians had a double share of digging – their daily share in the front lines, and when that was finished their nightly share, preparing cover for the new troops. During the nights of the latter half of July the Australians at Anzac dug, roofed, and covered not less than twenty miles of dugouts. All of this work was done in their sleep time, after the normal day’s work of fighting, digging, and carrying up stores. Besides digging these hiding-places they carried up, fixed, hid, and filled the water-tanks which were to supply the newcomers.

  On the night of the 3rd of August, when the landing of the new men began, the work was doubled. Everybody who could be spared from the front trenches went to the piers to help to land, carry inland, and hide the guns, stores, carts, and animals coming ashore. The nights, though lengthening, were still summer nights. There were seven hours of semi-darkness in which to cover up all traces of what came ashore. The newcomers landed at the rate of about 1,500 an hour, during the nights of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th of August. During those nights the Australians landed, carried inland, and hid, not less than one thousand tons of shells, cartridges, and food, some hundreds of horses and mules, many guns, and two or three hundred water-carts and ammunition-carts. All night long, for those three nights, the Australians worked like schoolboys. Often, towards dawn, it was a race against time, but always at dawn the night’s tally of new troops were in their billets, the new stores were underground, and the new horses hidden. When the morning aeroplanes came over, their observers saw nothing unusual in any part of Anzac. The half-naked men were going up and down the gullies, the wholly naked men were bathing in the sea; everything else was as it had always been, nor were any transports on the coast. For those three nights nearly all the Australians at Anzac gave up most of their sleep. They had begun the work by digging the cover; they took a personal pride and pleasure in playing the game of cache-cache to the end.

  It is difficult to praise a feat of the kind, and still more difficult to make people understand what the work meant. Those smiling and glorious young giants thought little of it. They loved their chiefs and they liked the fun, and when praised for it looked away with a grin. The labour of the task can only be felt by those who have done hard manual work in hot climates. Digging is one of the hardest kinds of work, even when done in a garden with a fork. When done in a trench with a pick and shovel it is as hard work as threshing with a flail. Carrying heavy weights over uneven ground is harder work still; and to do either of these things on a salt-meat diet, with a scanty allowance of water, is very, very hard; but to do them at night, after a hard day’s work, instead of sleeping, is hardest of all. Even farm-labourers would collapse and sailors mutiny when asked to do this last. It may be said that no one could have done this labour but splendid young men splendidly encouraged to do their best. Many of these same young men who had toiled thus almost without sleep for three days and nights fell in with the others and fought all through the battle.

  But all this preparation was a setting of precedents and the doing of something new to war. Never before have 25,000 men been kept buried under an enemy’s eye until the hour for the attack. Never before have two divisions of all arms been brought up punctually, by ship, over many miles of sea, from different ports, to land under fire, at an appointed time, to fulfil a great tactical scheme.

  But all these difficulties were as nothing to the difficulty of making sure that the men fighting in the blinding heat of a Gallipoli August should have enough water to drink. Eighty tons of water a day does not seem very much. It had only to be brought five hundred miles, which does not seem very far, to those who in happy peace can telephone for eighty tons of anything to be sent five hundred miles to anywhere. But in war, weight, distance, and time become terrible and tragic things, involving the lives of armies. The water-supply of that far battlefield, indifferent as it was at the best, was a triumph of resolve and skill unequalled yet in war. It is said that Wellington boasted that, while Napoleon could handle men, he, Wellington, could feed them. Our naval officers can truly say that, while Sir Ian Hamilton can handle men, they can give them drink.

  As to the enemy before the battle, it was estimated that (apart from the great strategical reserves within thirty or forty miles) there were 30,000 Turks in the vital part of the battlefield, to the north of Kilid Bahr. T
welve thousand of these were in the trenches opposite Anzac; most of the rest in the villages two or three miles to the south and south-east of Sari Bair. Three battalions were in the Anafarta villages, and one battalion was entrenched on Ismail Oglu Tepe; small outposts held the two Baba hillocks on the bay; and the land north of the bay was patrolled by mounted gendarmerie. These scattered troops on the Turk right had guns with them; it was not known how many. The beach of Suvla was known to be mined.

  August began with calm weather. The scattered regiments of the divisions for Suvla, after some weeks of hard exercise ashore, were sent on board their transports. At a little before four o’clock on the afternoon of the 6th of August the 29th Division began the battle by an assault on the Turk positions below Krithia.

  V

  Roland put the horn to his mouth, gripped it hard, and with great heart blew it. The hills were high, and the sound went very far: thirty leagues wide they heard it echo. Charles heard it and all his comrades; so the King said: “Our men are fighting.” Count Guenes answered: “If any other said that, I should call him a liar.”

  Count Roland, in pain and woe and great weakness, blew his horn. The bright blood was running from his mouth, and the temples of his brains were broken. But the noise of the horn was very great. Charles heard it as he was passing at the ports; Naimes heard it, the Franks listened to it. So the King said: “I hear the horn of Roland; he would never sound it if he were not fighting.” Guenes answered: “There is no fighting. You are old and white and hoary. You are like a child when you say such things.”

  Count Roland’s mouth was bleeding; the temples of his brain were broken. He blew his horn in weakness and pain. Charles heard it and his Franks heard it. So the King said: “That horn has long breath.” Duke Naimes answered: “Roland is in trouble. He is fighting, on my conscience. Arm yourself. Cry your war-cry. Help the men of your house. You hear plainly that Roland is in trouble.”

  The Emperor made sound his horns.... All the barons of the army mounted their chargers. But what use was that? They had delayed too long. What use was that? It was worth nothing; they had stayed too long; they could not be in time.

  Then Roland said: “Here we shall receive martyrdom, and now I know well that we have but a moment to live. But may all be thieves who do not sell themselves dearly first. Strike, knights, with your bright swords; so change your deaths and lives, that sweet France be not ashamed by us. When Charles comes into this field he shall see such discipline upon the Saracens that he shall not fail to bless us.” – The Song of Roland.

  The Cape Helles attack, designed to keep the Turks to the south of Kilid Bahr from reinforcing those near Anzac, became a very desperate struggle. The Turk trenches there were full of men, for the Turks had been preparing a strong attack upon ourselves, which we forestalled by a few hours. The severe fighting lasted for a week along the whole Cape Helles front, but it was especially bloody and terrible in the centre, in a vineyard to the west of the Krithia road. It has often happened in war that some stubbornness in attack or defence has roused the same quality in the opposer, till the honour of the armies seems pledged to the taking or holding of one patch of ground, perhaps not vital to the battle. It may be that in war one resolute soul can bind the excited minds of multitudes in a kind of bloody mesmerism; but these strange things are not studied as they should be. Near Krithia, the battle, which began as a containing attack, a minor part of a great scheme, became a furious weeklong fight for this vineyard, a little patch of ground “two hundred yards long by a hundred yards broad.”

  From the 6th to 13th of August, the fight for this vineyard never ceased. Our Lancashire regiments won most of it at the first assault on the 6th. For the rest of the week they held it against all that the Turks could bring against them. It was not a battle in the military textbook sense: it was a fight man to man, between two enemies whose blood was up. It was a weeklong cursing and killing scrimmage, the men lying down to fire and rising up to fight with the bayonet, literally all day long, day after day, the two sides within easy bombing distance all the time. The Turks lost some thousands of men in their attacks upon this vineyard; after a week of fighting they rushed it in a night attack, were soon bombed out of it, and then gave up the struggle for it. This bitter fighting not only kept the Turks at Cape Helles from reinforcing those at Anzac: it caused important Turk reinforcements to be sent to the Helles sector.

  Less than an hour after the 29th Division began the containing battle at Krithia, the Australians at Anzac began theirs. This, the attack on the Turk fort at Lone Pine, in the southern half of the Anzac front, was designed to keep large bodies of Turks from reinforcing their right, on Sari Bair, where the decisive blow was to be struck. It was a secondary operation, not the main thrust, but it was in itself important, since to those at Anzac the hill of Lone Pine was the gate into the narrowest part of the Peninsula, and through that gate, as the Turks very well-knew, a rush might be made from Anzac upon Maidos and the Narrows. Such a thrust from Lone Pine, turning all the Turkish works on the range of Sari Bair, was what the Turks expected and feared from us. They had shown us as much, quite plainly, all through the summer. Any movement, feint, or demonstration against Lone Pine brought up their reserves at once. It was the sensitive spot on their not too strong left wing. If we won through there, we had their main water-supply as an immediate prize, and no other position in front of us from which we could be held. Any strong attack there was therefore certain to contain fully half a division of the enemy.

  The hill of Lone or Lonesome Pine is a little plateau less than four hundred feet high, running north-west by south-east, and measuring perhaps two hundred and fifty yards long by two hundred across. On its south-western side it drops down in gullies to a col or ridge, known as Pine Ridge, which gradually declines away to the low ground near Gaba Tepe. On its north-eastern side it joins the high ground known as Johnston’s Jolly, which was, alas, neither jolly nor Johnston’s, but a strong part of the Turk position.

  We already held a little of the Lone Pine plateau. Our trenches bulged out into it in a convexity or salient known as the Pimple; but the Turks held the greater part, and their trenches curved out the other way, in a mouth, concavity, or trap opening towards the Pimple as though ready to swallow it. The opposing lines of trenches ran from north to south across the plateau, with from fifty to a hundred yards between them. Both to the north and south of the plateau are deep gullies. Just beyond these gullies Turk trenches were so placed that the machine guns in them could sweep the whole plateau. The space between the Australian and Turk lines was fairly level hilltop, covered with thyme and short scrub.

  For some days before the 6th of August the warships had been shelling the Turk position on Lone Pine to knock away the barbed wire in front of it. On the 5th, the Australian brigade told off for the attack, sharpened bayonets, and prepared their distinguishing marks of white bands for the left arms and white patches for the backs of their right shoulders. In the afternoon of the 6th, the shelling by the ships became more intense; at half-past four it quickened to a very heavy fire; at exactly half-past five it stopped suddenly, “the three short whistle-blasts sounded and were taken up along the line, our men cleared the parapet” in two waves on a front of about one hundred and sixty yards, “and attacked with vigour.” The hilltop over which they charged was in a night of smoke and dust from the explosions of the shells, and into that night, already singing with enemy bullets, the Australians disappeared. They had not gone twenty yards before all that dark and blazing hilltop was filled with explosion and flying missiles from every enemy gun. One speaks of a hail of bullets, but no hail is like fire, no hail is a form of death crying aloud a note of death, no hail screams as it strikes a stone, or stops a strong man in his stride. Across that kind of hail the Australians charged on Lone Pine. “It was a grim kind of steeplechase,” said one, “but we meant to get to Koja Dere.” They reached the crumpled wire of the entanglement, and got through it to the parapet of the Tu
rk trench, where they were held up. Those behind them at the Pimple, peering through the darkness to see if any had survived the rush, saw figures on the parados of the enemy’s trench, and wondered what was happening. They sent forward the third wave, with one full company carrying picks and shovels, to make good what was won. The men of this third wave found what was happening.

  The Turkish front line trench was not, like most trenches, an open ditch into which men could jump, but covered over along nearly all its length with blinders and beams of pinewood, heaped with sandbags, and in some places with a couple of feet of earth. Under this cover the Turks fired at our men through loopholes, often with their rifles touching their victims. Most of the Australians, after heaving in vain to get these blinders up, under a fire that grew hotter every instant, crossed them, got into the open communication trenches in the rear of the Turk line, and attacked through them; but some, working together, hove up a blinder or two, and down the gaps so made those brave men dropped themselves, to a bayonet fight like a rat fight in a sewer, with an enemy whom they could hardly see, in a narrow dark gash in the earth where they were, at first, as one to five or seven or ten.

  More and more men dropped down or rushed in from the rear; the Turks, so penned in, fought hard, but could not beat back the attack. They surrendered, and were disarmed. The survivors were at least as many as their captors, who had too much to do at that time to send them to the rear, even if there had been a safe road by which to send them. They were jammed up there in the trenches with the Australians, packed man to man, suffering from their friends’ fire and getting in the way.

  The first thing to be done was to block up the communication trenches against the Turkish counter-attack. Every man carried a couple of sandbags, and with these, breastworks and walls were built. Their work was done in a narrow, dark, sweltering tunnel, heaped with corpses and wounded, and crowded with prisoners who might at any moment have risen. Already the Turks had begun their counter-attacks. At every other moment a little rush of Turks came up the communication trenches, flung their bombs in the workers’ faces, and were bayoneted as they threw. The trenches curved and zigzagged in the earth; the men in one section could neither see nor hear what the men in the nearest sections were doing. What went on under the ground there in the making good of those trenches will never be known. From half-past five till midnight every section of the line was searched by bombs and bullets, by stink-pots and sticks of dynamite, by gas-bombs and a falling tumult of shell and shrapnel, which only ceased to let some rush of Turks attack, with knives, grenades, and bayonets, hand to hand and body to body in a blackness like the darkness of a mine. At midnight the wounded were lying all over the trenches; the enemy dead were so thick that our men had to walk on them, and bombs were falling in such numbers that every foot in those galleries was stuck with human flesh. No man slept that night. At half-past seven next morning (the 7th) a small quantity of bread and tea was rushed across the plateau to the fighters, who had more than earned their breakfast. Turk shell had by this time blown up some of the head-cover, and some of the new communication trenches were still only a few feet deep. A Colonel, passing along one of them, told an officer that his section of the trench was too shallow. Half an hour later, in passing back, he found the officer and three men blown to pieces by a shell; in a few minutes more he was himself killed. At noon the bombing became so severe that some sections of the line were held only by one or two wounded men. At one o’clock the enemy attacked furiously with bomb and bayonet, in great force. They came on in a mass, in wave after wave, shoulder to shoulder, heads down, shouting the name of God. They rushed across the plateau, jumped into the trenches, and were mixed up with our men in a hand-to-hand fight, which lasted for five hours. Not many of them could join in the fight at one time, and not many of them went back to the Turk lines; but they killed many of our men, and when their last assault failed our prize was very weakly held. At half-past seven the survivors received a cheering (and truthful) message from the Brigadier, “that no fighters can surpass Australians,” and almost with the message came another Turk assault, begun by bomb and shell and rifle fire, and followed by savage rushes with the bayonet, one of which got in, and did much slaughter. No man slept that night. The fight hardly slackened all through the night; at dawn the dead were lying three deep in every part of the line. Bombs fell every minute in some section of the line, and where the wide Turk trenches had been blasted open they were very destructive. The men were “extremely tired, but determined to hold on.” They did hold on.