John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works

by Philip Errington

  All those sun-smitten hills and gullies, growing nothing but crackling scrub, were peopled by crowds. On all the roads, on the plain, which lay white like salt in the glare, and on the sides of the gullies, strange, sunburned, half-naked men moved at their work with the bronze bodies of gods. Like Egyptians building a city, they passed and repassed with boxes from the walls of stores built on the beach. Dust had toned their uniforms even with the land. Their half-nakedness made them more grand than clad men. Very few of them were less than beautiful; whole battalions were magnificent, the very flower of the world’s men. They had a look in their eyes which those who saw them will never forget.

  Sometimes, as one watched, one heard a noise of cheering from the ships, and this, the herald of good news, passed inland, till men would rise from sleep in their dugouts, come to the door, blinking in the sun, to pass on the cheer. In some strange way the news, the cause of the cheering, passed inland with the cheer, a submarine had sunk a transport off Constantinople, or an aeroplane had bombed a powder factory. One heard the news pass on and on, till it rang from the front trenches ten yards from the Turk line. Sometimes the cheering was very loud, mingled with singing; then it was a new battalion, coming from England, giving thanks that they were there, after their months of training, to help the fleet through. Men who heard those battalions singing will never hear those songs of “Tipperary,” “Let’s all go down the Strand,” or “We’ll all go the same way home,” without a quickening at the heart.

  Everywhere in the three positions there were the homes of men. In gashes or clefts of the earth were long lines of mules or horses with Indian grooms. On the beaches were offices, with typewriters clicking and telephone bells ringing. Stacked on one side were ammunition-carts so covered with bushes that they looked like the scrub they stood on. Here and there were strangely painted guns, and everywhere the work of men, armourers’ forges, farriers’ anvils, the noise and clink and bustle of a multitude. Everywhere, too, but especially in the gullies, were the cave-dwellings of the dugouts, which so dotted the cliffs with their doors that one seemed put back to Cro-Magnon or Tampa, into some swarming tribe of cave-dwellers. All the dugouts were different, though all were built upon the same principle, first a scooping in the earth, then a raised earth ledge for a bed, then (if one were lucky) a corrugated iron roof propped by balks, lastly a topping of sandbags strewn with scrub. For doors, if one had a door or sunshade, men used sacking, burlap, a bit of canvas, or a blanket. Then, when the work was finished, the builder entered in, to bathe in his quarter of a pint of water, smoke his pipe, greet his comrades, and think foul scorn of the Turk, whose bullets piped and droned overhead, all day and night, like the little finches of home. Looking out from the upper dugouts, one saw the dusty, swarming warren of men, going and coming, with a kind of swift slouch, carrying boxes from the beach. Mules and men passed; songs went up and down the gullies, and were taken up by those at rest; men washed and mended clothes, or wandered naked and sun-reddened along the beach, bathing among dropping bullets. Wounded men came down on stretchers, sick men babbled in pain or cursed the flies, the forges clinked, the pile-drivers beat in the balks of the piers, the bullets droned and piped, or rushed savagely, or pobbed into a sandbag. Up in the trenches the rifles made the irregular snaps of fire-crackers, sometimes almost ceasing, then popping, then running along a section in a rattle, then quickening down the line and drawing the enemy, then pausing and slowly ceasing and beginning again. From time to time, with a whistle and a wailing, some Asian shell came over, and drooped and seemed to multiply, and gathered to herself the shriek of all the devils of hell, and burst like a devil, and filled a great space with blackness and dust and falling fragments. Then another and another came, almost in the same place, till the gunners had had enough. Then the dust settled, the ruin was made good, and all went on as before, men carrying and toiling and singing, bullets piping, and the flies settling and swarming on whatever was obscene in what the shell had scattered.

  Everywhere in those positions there was gaiety and courage and devoted brotherhood; but there was also another thing, which brooded over all, and struck right home to the heart. It was a tragical feeling, a taint or flavour in the mind, such as men often feel in hospitals when many are dying, the sense that Death was at work there, that Death lived there, that Death wandered up and down there and fed on Life.

  Since the main object of the campaign, to help the fleet through the Narrows, had been abandoned (in mid-August), and no further thrust was to be made against the Turks, the questions, “Were our 100,000 men in Gallipoli containing a sufficiently large army of Turks to justify their continuance on the Peninsula?” and “Could they be more profitably used elsewhere?” arose in the minds of the High Direction from week to week as the war changed and increased.

  In the early autumn, when the Central Powers combined with Bulgaria to crush Serbia and open a road to Constantinople, these questions became acute. During October, owing to the radical change in the Balkan situation, which was produced by the treachery of Bulgaria and the bewildering indecision of Greece, the advantage of our continuing the campaign became more and more doubtful; and in November, after full consideration, it was decided to evacuate the Peninsula. Preparations were made and the work begun.

  Late in November something happened which had perhaps some influence in hurrying on the date of the evacuation. This was the blizzard of the 26th to 28th, which lost us about a tenth of our whole army from cold, frostbite, exposure, and the sicknesses which follow them. The 26th began as a cold, dour Gallipoli day with a bitter north-easterly wind, which increased in the afternoon to a fresh gale, with sleet. Later, it increased still more, and blew hard, with thunder; and with the thunder came a rain more violent than any man of our army had ever seen. Water pours off very quickly from that land of abrupt slopes. In a few minutes every gully was a raging torrent, and every trench a river. By an ill-chance this storm fell with cruel violence upon the ever famous 29th Division, then holding trenches at Suvla. The water poured down into their trenches as though it were a tidal wave. It came in with a rush, with a head upon it like the tide advancing, so quickly that men were one minute dry and the next moment drowned at their posts. They were caught so suddenly that those who escaped had to leap from their trenches for dear life, leaving coats, haversacks, food, and sometimes even their rifles, behind them.

  Our trenches were in nearly every case below those of the Turks, who therefore suffered from the water far less than our men did. The Turks saw our men leaping from their trenches, and, either guessing the reason or fearing an attack, opened a very heavy rifle and shrapnel fire upon them. Our men had to shelter behind the parados of their trenches, where they scraped themselves shallow pans in the mud under a heavy fire. At dark the sleet increased, the mud froze, and there our men lay, most of them without overcoats, and many of them without food. In one trench when the flood rose, a pony, a mule, a pig, and two dead Turks were washed over a barricade together.

  Before the night fell, many of our men were frostbitten, and started limping to the ambulances, under continual shrapnel fire and in blinding sleet. A good many fell down by the way, and were frozen to death. The gale increased slowly all through the night, blowing hard and steadily from the north, making a great sea upon the coast, and driving the spray far inland. At dawn it grew colder, and the sleet hardened into snow, with an ever-increasing wind, which struck through our men to the marrow. “They fell ill,” said one who was there, “in heaps.” The water from the flood had fallen in the night, but it was still four feet deep in many of the trenches, and our men passed the morning under fire in their shelter pans, fishing for food and rifles in their drowned lines. All through the day the wind gathered, till it was blowing a full gale, vicious and bitter cold; and on the 28th it reached its worst. The 28th was spoken of afterwards as “Frozen Foot Day”; it was a day more terrible than any battle. But now it was taking toll of the Turks, and the fire slackened. Probably either side
could have had the other’s position for the taking on the 28th, had there been enough unfrosted feet to advance. It was a day so blind with snow and driving storm that neither side could see to fire, and this brought the advantage, that our men, hopping to the ambulances, had not to go through a pelt of shrapnel bullets. On the 29th, the limits of human strength were reached. Some of those frozen three days before were able to return to duty, but “a great number of officers and men who had done their best to stick it out were forced to go to hospital.” The water fell during this day, but it left on an average two and a half feet of thick, slushy mud, into which many trenches collapsed. After this the weather was fine and warm.

  At Helles and Anzac the fall of the ground gave some protection from this gale, but at Suvla there was none. When the weather cleared, the beaches were heaped with the wreck of piers, piles, boats and lighters, all broken and jammed together. But great as this wreck was, the wreck of men was even greater. The 29th Division had lost two-thirds of its strength. In the three sectors over 200 men were dead, over 10,000 were unfit for further service, and not less than 30,000 others were sickened and made old by it.

  The Turk loss was much more serious even than this, for though they suffered less from the wet, they suffered more from the cold, through being on the higher ground. The snow lay upon their trenches long after it had gone from ours, and the Turk equipment, though very good as far as it went, was only good for the summer. Their men wore thin clothes, and many of them had neither overcoat nor blanket. The blizzard, which was a discouragement to us, took nearly all the heart out of the Turks; and this fact must be borne in mind in the reading of the next few pages.

  The gale had one good effect: either the cold or the rain destroyed or removed the cause of the dysentery, which had taken nearly a thousand victims a day for some months. The disease stopped at once, and no more fresh cases were reported.

  This storm made any attempt to land or to leave the land impossible for four days together. Coming, as it did, upon the decision to evacuate, it gave the prompting, that the evacuation should be hurried, lest such weather should prevent it. On the 8th of December, the evacuation of Anzac and Suvla was ordered to begin.

  It was not an easy task to remove large numbers of men, guns, and animals from positions commanded by the Turk observers, and open to every cruising aeroplane. But by ruse and skill, and the use of the dark, favoured by fine weather, the work was done, almost without loss, and, as far as one could judge, unsuspected.

  German agents, eager to discredit those whom they could not defeat, have said “that we bribed the Turks to let us go”; next year, perhaps, they will say “that the Turks bribed us to go”; the year after that, perhaps, they will invent something equally false and even sillier. But putting aside the foulness and the folly of this bribery lie, it is interesting to inquire how it happened that the Turks did not attack our men while they were embarking.

  The Turks were very good fighters, furious in attack and resolute in defence, but among their qualities of mind were some which greatly puzzled our commanders. Their minds would sometimes work in ways very strange to Europeans. They did, or refrained from doing, certain things in ways for which neither we nor our Allies could account. Someday, long hence, when the war is over, the Turk story of our withdrawal will be made known. Until then, we can only guess why it was that the embarkation, which many had thought would lose us half our army, was made good from Anzac and Suvla with the loss of only four or five men (or less than the normal loss of a night in the trenches). Only two explanations are possible. Either (1) the Turks knew that we were going, and wanted to be rid of us; or (2) they did not know that we were going, and were entirely deceived by our ruses.

  Had they known that we were going from Anzac and Suvla, it is at least likely that they would have hastened our going, partly that they might win some booty, which they much needed, or take a large number of prisoners, whose appearance would have greatly cheered the citizens of Constantinople. But nearly all those of our army who were there felt, both from observation and intelligence, that the Turks did not know that we were going. As far as men on one side in a war can judge of their enemies, they felt that the Turks were deceived, completely deceived, by the ruses employed by us, and that they believed that we were being strongly reinforced for a new attack. Our soldiers took great pains to make them believe this. Looking down upon us from their heights, the Turks saw boats leaving the shore apparently empty, and returning, apparently, full of soldiers. Looking up at them; from our position our men saw how the sight affected them. For the twelve days during which the evacuation was in progress at Anzac and Suvla, the Turks were plainly to be seen, digging everywhere to secure themselves from the feared attack. They dug new lines, they brought up new guns, they made ready for us in every way. On the night of the 19th – 20th December, in hazy weather, at full moon, our men left Suvla and Anzac unmolested.

  It was said by Dr. Johnson that “no man does anything, consciously for the last time, without a feeling of sadness.” No man of all that force passed down those trenches, the scenes of so much misery and pain and joy and valour and devoted brotherhood, without a deep feeling of sadness. Even those who had been loudest in their joy at going were sad. Many there did not want to go, but felt that it was better to stay, and that then, with another 50,000 men, the task could be done, and their bodies and their blood buy victory for us. This was the feeling even at Suvla, where the men were shaken and sick still from the storm; but at Anzac, the friendly little kindly city, which had been won at such cost in the ever-glorious charge of the 25th, and held since with such pain, and built with such sweat and toil and anguish, in thirst, and weakness, and bodily suffering, which had seen the thousands of the 13th Division land in the dark and hide, and had seen them fall in with the others to go to Chunuk, and had known all the hope and fervour, all the glorious resolve, and all the bitterness and disappointment of the unhelped attempt, the feeling was far deeper. Officers and men went up and down the well-known gullies moved almost to tears by the thought that the next day those narrow acres so hardly won and all those graves of our people so long defended would be in Turk hands.

  For some weeks our men had accustomed the Turks to sudden cessations of fire for half an hour or more. At first the Turks had been made suspicious by these silences, but they were now used to them, and perhaps glad of them. They were not made suspicious by the slackening of the fire on the night of the withdrawal. The mules and guns had all gone from Suvla. A few mules and a few destroyed guns were left at Anzac; in both places a pile of stores was left, all soaked in oil and ready for firing. The ships of war drew near to the coast, and trained their guns on the hills. In the haze of the full moon the men filed off from the trenches down to the beaches, and passed away from Gallipoli, from the unhelped attempt which they had given their bodies and their blood to make. They had lost no honour. They were not to blame, that they were creeping off in the dark, like thieves in the night. Had others (not of their profession), many hundreds of miles away, but been as they, as generous, as wise, as foreseeing, as full of sacrifice, those thinned companies with the looks of pain in their faces, and the mud of the hills thick upon their bodies, would have given thanks in Santa Sophia three months before. They had failed to take Gallipoli, and the minefields still barred the Hellespont, but they had fought a battle such as has never been seen upon this earth. What they had done will become a glory for ever, wherever the deeds of heroic unhelped men are honoured and pitied and understood. They went up at the call of duty, with a bright banner of a battle-cry, against an impregnable fort. Without guns, without munitions, without help, and without drink, they climbed the scarp, and held it by their own glorious manhood, quickened by a word from their chief. Now they were giving back the scarp, and going out into new adventures, wherever the war might turn.

  Those going down to the beaches wondered in a kind of awe whether the Turks would discover them and attack. The minutes passed, and boat after
boat left the shore, but no attack came. The arranged rifles fired mechanically in the outer trenches at long intervals, and the crackle of the Turk reply followed. At Anzac, a rearguard of honour had been formed. The last two hundred men to leave Anzac were survivors of those who had landed in the first charge, so glorious and so full of hope, on the 25th of April. They had fought through the whole campaign from the very beginning; they had seen it all. It was only just that they should be the last to leave. As they, too, moved down, one of their number saw a solitary Turk, black against the sky, hard at work upon his trench. That was the last enemy to be seen from Anzac.

  At half-past five in the winter morning of the 20th of December the last boat pushed off, and the last of our men had gone from Suvla and Anzac. Those who had been there from the first were deeply touched. There was a longing that it might be to do again, with the same comrades, under the same chiefs, but with better luck and better backing. Some distance from the shore the boats paused to watch the last act in the withdrawal. It was dead calm weather, with just that ruffle of wind which comes before the morning. The Turk fire crackled along the lines as usual, but the withdrawal was still not suspected. Then from the beaches within the stacks of abandoned stores came the noise of explosion; the charges had been fired, and soon immense flames were licking up those boxes and reddening the hills. As the flames grew, there came a stir in the Turk lines, and then every Turk gun that could be brought to bear opened with shrapnel and high-explosive on the area of the bonfires. It was plain that the Turks misread the signs. They thought that some lucky shell had fired our stores, and that they could stop us from putting out the flames. Helped by the blasts of many shells, the burning rose like bale-fire, crowned by wreaths and streaks and spouts of flame. The stores were either ashes or in a blaze which none could quench before the Turks guessed the meaning of that burning. Long before the fires had died and before the Turks were wandering in joy among our trenches, our men were aboard their ships standing over to Mudros.