Went to the service this morning with the General, in the amphitheatre. The sermon was mainly against America for not coming into the war, and also against bad language. The chaplain said he could not understand the meaning of it. The men laughed. So did I.
Monday, June 7th, 1915. Kaba Tepé. This morning the land was sweet as Eden and there was the calm of the first creation. I wanted to gallop on the Turkish officer’s horse to Nebronesi point but could not find the officer in charge, and later was prevented. Hough has been stellen bosched to the firing line, half stellenbosched, half Uriah the Hittite by Blamey, not because of Mrs. Hough. Tremendous shelling going on round the dugout; if this keeps up it will be knocked down and I shall be hit. In the night I was invaded by mice. This afternoon Butler, Onslow and I climbed the hill and had a beautiful view. Everyone rather ill and feverish. The Intelligence Office of Harold Pirie-Gordon61, poor chap, who went sick a long time ago, and Hay whom we call Kru Ot (dry grass in Turkish equals Hay) when we don’t want him to understand, has been moved higher and safer. I rather liked the stuffy old place which was called ‘The Mountain Path to the Jackal’s Cave.’
The attack last night failed, but the drone of the rifles went on unceasingly, like the drone of a dry waterfall. We shall not get to Constantinople unless the flat-faced Bulgars come in.
Yesterday I lunched with Temperley at the HQ of Monash Valley. Times have changed: it’s fairly safe going there through a long sap they have dug, and the noise is less bad.
Colonel Infantry Johnston who is the Brigadier had seen a lot of the Crown Prince in India, and said he was a very good fellow. Dined with Woods, Dix, Sam Butler and Edwards. Champagne galore for once, political stories and a great dinner.
Went off this morning to No. 2 with the General. Sap all the way now, much safer, only one snipe at all of us together instead of, as last time, each one having several shots at him alone. The Turkish birds were singing beautifully as we went. There was also a Turkish snake, which I believe was quite harmless, but Tahu killed it. One can see the men are growing pretty weary. They aren’t as resigned as the 10,000 brother monks of Mt. Athos. It was the proper name to give this cover, the name of ANZAC, for Anjak in Turkish means only just or barely.
Friday, June 11th, 1915. Kaba Tepé. I have been considering if it would be of any use to be made prisoner. If one got taken one would have to get taken very plausibly and it would have to appear an unwise reconnaissance. I will talk to the General about it. I wonder if it came off if I would have the chance of seeing and talking with Talaat. Nearly all the Australians on the beach are half or quite naked. Many of the New Zealanders too. This is pretty well the same. They lie about and bathe and become darker than Indians. It’s an extraordinary thing that if the sun gets at a naked white man it does make him darker than a native. A more delicate skin I suppose. The General objects to this. ‘I suppose,’ he says, ‘we shall have our servants waiting on us like that.’ His stud groom Douglas who looks after the donkeys is never dressed. The flies are very bad, and so are the mice but they fear that my typewriter is a trap and leave me a little alone. The shelling also is bad and I thought I saw lice this morning.
This morning I saw five men hit and there were a lot more. Edwardes is very pessimistic. He is one of the nicest fellows I have ever met. The only compensation that this war gives us is friendships that one would never have made otherwise, but it doesn’t make amends for those friends one has lost.
Saturday June 12th, 1915. Kaba Tepé. Two months ago to-day we left Alexandria. I told General Godley I was ready to be made prisoner, mainly for these reasons. It is very important for us to get through, and it is very important for the Turks to survive, but if we make it evident that we want to begin negotiations we court a rebuff, and if they, on the other hand, make démarches which we don’t accept they have put themselves wrong with the Germans and probably their own countrymen too. Therefore what you want if you can get it is a telephone that won’t compromise either party. I could talk to the Young Turks whom I have known and helped and, with their winking at it, pass on their views. I said it was no use putting it before GHQ. They would take no idea that was not their own, and they never had any, and anyway becoming prisoner would be quite the last to occur to them. The General agreed with me. He said if he was Hamilton he would certainly have encouraged a number of things of that kind, and was kind enough to say pleasant things. He said he would speak to Birdwood, meanwhile I had better think out details. The General has gone sick, worse luck.
Sunday, June 13th, 1915. Kaba Tepé. A lot of mules and several men hit yesterday. Last night, Sam and I were on the beach, when a man on a stretcher went by, groaning rhythmically. I thought he had been shot through the brain. Later on I went into the hospital to find a wounded Turk, and found that this man had never been hit at all. He had been doing very good work till a shell exploded near him and gave him a shock. Then he went on imitating a machine gun. Some men in a sap up at Quinn’s have been going off their heads. Birdwood is a very good fellow but he won’t hear of the prisoner business.
Awful accounts of Mudros: flies, heat, sand, no water, typhoid. To-day are the Greek elections.
Am dining with Harold Woods. ‘The beach’ now says that It has been poisoned by the Greek guides, whom he illtreats and uses as cooks. I shouldn’t wonder. The shelling is bad. I am going to make a new dugout to get away from the flies and mice. The Turkish prisoners will do this. I pay them a small sum.
Tuesday, June 15th, 1915. Kaba Tepé. Colonel Chauvel has pleurisy, Colonel Johnston63 enteric. The sea’s high and the Navy depressed. There is a perpetual row between the Navy and the Army. One man and two mules killed in our gully this morning; the body of one mule blown about 50 yards both ways.
Wednesday, June 16th, 1915. Kaba Tepé. Rain. I was to have gone to Helles with Woods to see Deedes64, but no boats went; it was too rough. I was going down from HQ to see Butler about spies when General Cunliffe Owen said to me.:‘Wait a bit, the shelling is too bad now and I will come with you,’ but I couldn’t wait. A shell fell in the gully as I crossed a few yards from me. Woods came out to see where it had hit. It went into Maconochie’s dugout where Hough was and sent him out, dizzy, black and shaken, his furniture destroyed. Hay tried to turn him out of the Intelligence dugout but we protested. He isn’t a pleasant fellow, but I felt sorry for him. The General has come back with the last casualty lists from France. One feels ashamed of being alive. I wish I hadn’t written to some people whose sons have since been killed. One couldn’t guess that all these men were going to be killed.
Thursday, June 17th, 1915. Helles. Thirty men killed and wounded on the beach to-day. This morning I came to Helles with Woods. As we got there a submarine had two shots at one of our transports by us. I was to have seen Deedes, but he had gone off to see Gouraud. George Peel walked in and took me round the beach, two miles on. We climbed on to the headland, in what he called ‘the quiet track of the Black Marias.’ He talked of every mortal thing – the future Liberal and Socialist, the possibility of touching the heart of the people, the collapse of Christianity, our past and our policy. I left him and walked back across thyme and asphodel, Asia glowing like a jewel across the Dardanelles in the sunset. At night I talked late and long with Dash. Every Department is jealous, everyone is at cross-purposes, no co-operation between the War Office and the Foreign Office.
Walked in the morning to the HQ of the Royal Naval Division with Whittall. We were shelled most of the way in the open landscape. There was no cover anywhere. It felt unfamiliar. I was unfavourably impressed with the insecurity of life in this part of the world, and wished for Anzac. In the evening we drank mavrodaphne and tried to get rid of Hough.
Friday, June 18th, 1915. Kaba Tepé. I left Helles in the middle of very heavy shelling, a star performance. A lot of horses killed this morning. A submarine popped up last night. As we came back to Anzac the Turks shelled our trawler and hit her twice, but without doing any damage.
She
lling grew worse at Anzac, and sickness began to make itself felt. Men were sent across to Imbros when it was possible to rest.
Diary. On June 25th I went across to Imbros with Harold Woods and the Greek miller, Nikolas. Hawker was there and mad Elliot of Macedonia whom I did not see. If Elliot took a dislike to any man he dug him out of his dugout. We slept uncomfortably with flies to keep us warm on the ground. As I wrote this Johnny was hit outside, and another shrapnel came through my dugout, one bullet glancing off my typewriter. Johnny not bad; carried him down at once with Conolly under very heavy fire, and got him special attention. Luck for the General – his blankets were riddled with bullets. Johnny hit through the calf of the leg. Thousands of flies on the wounded. Many men hit on the beach. They have our range completely. Two days ago Colonel Parker had his chair and table smashed while he was in his dugout. He left it and went to have tea with Wagstaffe. There he was reading and another bullet came and tore the paper in his hand in two. I have been covered twice with dirt by a shell, not counting this afternoon, in the last three days. L.S. Amery65 came with Kelly. I only saw him for a minute, worse luck, but he is coming back to-morrow, I hope, when we can have a talk. GHQ turned up in force, and walked about like wooden images.
We have a foolish sergeant MacAlister, a clerk. He has got tired of writing, and, wanting to change the pen for the sword, borrowed a rifle and walked up to the front line at Quinn’s Post. There he popped his head in and said: ‘Excuse me, is this a private trench, or may anyone fire out of it?’
The sound of battle has ended. Men are bathing. The clouds that the cannonade had called up are gone, and the sea is still and crimson in the sunset to Imbros and Samothrace.
Tuesday, June 29th, 1915. Anzac. When I went down Johnny had already gone. Shall go to the hospital ship to-morrow, inshallah. We have advanced 1,000 yards down at Helles but no details yet. Many men shot here yesterday by the Anafarta gun. This gun has as good a tale of killed and wounded as, I should think, any gun of the war. Every day it gets its twenty odd. On my roof again to-day but not inside. The Australians attacked on the right flank yesterday; about fifty killed and wounded. They think the Turks suffered more heavily. I went for a walk to the extreme left with the General. Terrific heat. We came to a beautiful little valley filled with thyme and wild lavender which the Maoris are to inhabit. The men were bathing beyond the shrapnel point. They said the Turks were very good and let them. It is extraordinary to remember that the Army Corps order was pretty close to NO QUARTER when we started this campaign. Men are practising bomb-throwing everywhere. Had two letters two months old; also the whisky sent me from Alexandria was all looted. Mrs. Luscombe, the ex-Lady of the ex-Grand Vizier of Afghanistan who is in prison because he, the Ex-Grand Vizier, was a progressive man, wants me to get her boy a place as a saddler. Lots of men here would like that job. It’s a day of blessed peace, but there’s a lot of feeling about the Anafarta gun, and bathing is stopped on the beach till night. The men are now darker than Red Indians.
Wednesday, June 30th, 1915. Anzac. Last night I went down to the hospital and was inoculated for cholera by Corbyn, a witty man. A trench had been blown in, and men were lying groaning on the floor, most of them suffering from shell shock, not wounds. Corbyn said many of the doctors had not been able to face the work. The wounds and mutilations were too horrible. I remember the same in France. I asked him why the wounded were not sent to Cyprus instead of Mudros. He said because it’s a splendid climate and there is heaps of water. The first doctor at Mudros is useless, the second a drunkard so I hear. Anyway, what is certain is that the condition of the sick and wounded is awful. That they can tell one.
There was a fight here last night and bullets all over the place. This morning it is very rough and I can’t yet get to the hospital ship. Prisoners coming in. The General had a row with the Staff because he said he got no information and told me to examine the prisoners. This I wouldn’t do, as it’s no use for an outsider to quarrel with the regular soldiers.
July 1st, 1915. Anzac. I examined the prisoners, amongst them a tall Armenian lawyer, who talked some English. I asked him how he had surrendered. He said: ‘I saw two gentlemen with their looking-glasses, and came over to them.’ By this he meant two officers with periscopes. He said that the psychology of the Turks is a curious thing. They do not fear death, yet are not brave. They attack a man-of-war vessel with rifles yet are not brave. No water came in yesterday. The storm wrecked the barges and the beach is covered with lighters. We got brackish water from the hill. I could not get to Jack for work.
At lunch I heard there were wounded crying on Walker’s Ridge, and went up there with Zachariades. We found a very nice Australian, Major Reynell. We went through the trenches, dripping with sweat. It was a boiling day and my head reeled from the inoculation; then we had to crawl through a sap over dead Turks, some of whom were in a ghastly condition, headless and covered with flies; then out from the darkness into another sap with another dead Turk to walk over. The Turkish trenches were thirty yards off and the dead lay between the two lines when I called. I was answered at once by a Turk. He said he couldn’t move, and I went out to him with a rope and a water-bottle. I gave him a drink but could not carry him for fear of hurting him and there was a heap of dead in the way. He was a big man, badly wounded. Reynell came out and we got him in, stumbling over the dead amongst whom he lay. I went back for the water-bottle but they began shooting to warn me and I picked up a bayonet and ran back into the trench. A dreadful time getting the Turk out through the very narrow trench. I got one other, unwounded, shamming dead. We threw him a rope and in he came66. After that I went to Monash Valley and jumped out of a sap there and shouted into the scrub but got no answer.
The taking of the second Turk was a curious episode that perhaps deserves a little more description than is given by the diary. The process of catching Turks fascinated the Australians, and amongst them an RAMC doctor who came round on that occasion. This officer prided himself upon neatness and a smart appearance, when the dust and heat of the Dardanelles had turned everyone else into scallywags. After he had attended to the first wounded man, he pointed out the second Turk lying between our trenches and the Turks’ and only a few yards from either. ‘You go out again, sir,’ said the Australians; ‘it’s as good as a show.’ I, however, took another view. I called out to the Turk: ‘Do you want any water?’ ‘By God,’ he whispered back, ‘I do, but I am afraid of my people.’ We then threw him a rope and pulled him in. He told us that the night before he had lost direction in the attack. Fire seemed to be coming every way, and it had seemed to him the best plan to fall and lie still amongst his dead comrades. The doctor gave him some water, with which he rinsed his mouth, and I left him under the charge of the RAMC doctor. This is what happened subsequently. They had to crawl back through the secret sap, from which the bodies of the dead Turks had by that time been removed and left at the entrance. The Turk was blindfolded, but when he saw his dead comrades, over whose bodies he had to step, he leapt to the conclusion that it was our habit to bring our prisoners to one place and there to kill them. He gave one panic-stricken yell; he threw his arms round the neck of the well-dressed officer; they fell and rolled upon the corpses together, the Turk in convulsions of fear clinging to the neck of the doctor, pressing his face to the faces of the dead till he was covered with blood and dust and the ghastly remains of death, while the soldiers stood round saying to the Turk: ‘Now, don’t you carry on so.’
Diary. Friday, July 2nd, 1915. Anzac. At night a great storm blew up. The lightning played in splendid glares over Imbros and Samothrace, the sea roared, the thunder crashed and the rain spouted down. After a time that stopped and looking out I saw a cloud, black as ink, coming down like a pall just overhead. I went to the General whom I found out and asked him if he thought it was gas; he thought it was a water spout, but it left him pretty cold. Had a divine bathe this morning with Birdwood but am feeling rather ill.
Yesterday morning I fo
und the two Whittalls en route for Helles. They had come with General de Lotbinière67 and his periscopes. I went off to the Sicilia to see Jack, and had a lot of trouble about a pass. I saw Jack. He said they had re-bound his leg on the beach, but that it had not been looked at for eighteen hours on the boat. It had swelled to double its size. Then a doctor came and said the bandage had been done too tight, and there was a chance of his losing his leg. I felt absolutely savage. Saw General Howse VC on shore whom I loathe, but who is going on board and bosses the show, and I got him to promise to do what he could. We had a bad time going home. We were slung off the ship in wooden cases. It was very rough indeed, and when the wooden case hit the flat barge it bounced like anything. Then we were towed out on this flat barge, open to the great waves and shrapnel, to a lighter, and left off Anzac for a couple of hours. The Turks sent a few shells, absent-mindedly. Finally, a trawler brought us off, very angry.
Skeen dined, a scholarly fanatic, interesting about the next war, which he thinks will be with Russia, in fifteen years. A lot of people going sick.
I saw Cox to-night, who said that this is the worst storm we have had. We have only one day’s water supply. We could have had as much as we had wanted, but many of the cans stored on the beach are useless, as they have had holes knocked in them by the shrapnel. We are not as abstemious as the Turks, who had been lying for so many hours under the sun, and shall suffer from thirst badly.
Saturday, July 3rd, 1915. Anzac. Macaulay has come as our artillery officer. I dined with him and H. Woods last night. Yesterday it rained. Jack’s boat has gone. We are being badly shelled here. I shall have to change my dugout, if this goes on. The guide Katzangaris has been hit in the mouth.
Sunday, July 4th, 1915. Yesterday I went with the General and Ross to see the Maoris who have just landed. Saw one of Huias tribe and Dr. Buck the MP. The General made them a speech and they danced a very fine Haka with tremendous enthusiasm when he had finished. They loved digging their dugouts and even seemed pleased when they came upon the poor fellows who had been killed in or after the landing. Ian Hamilton wrote officially to ask if they required a special diet. General G. replied officially that he hoped to have sufficient stock of Turkish prisoners going to keep them fat. More people going sick. Doctor Fyfe told me that he and another doctor had asked to be allowed to help on board the hospital ships where they have more wounded than they can deal with, short-handed as they are, but have been refused permission by the RAMC.
Mons, Anzac and Kut Page 13