The First World War

by John Keegan

  Some of the Turks, nevertheless, had run away; those at Kum Kale surrendered to the French in hundreds before the withdrawal on 26 April. More might have turned tail on the peninsula had not reserves been close at hand and under the command of an officer of outstanding ability and determination. Mustapha Kemal had been one of the earliest Young Turks but his career had not followed that of the leaders. In April 1915, he was, aged thirty-four, only a divisional commander. Fate decreed, however, that his division, the 19th, stood at the critical place at the critical moment. Massed on the peninsula just opposite the Narrows, it was only four miles from ANZAC and, though high ground lay in between, could by forced marching intervene against the landings even while they were in progress. Kemal, reacting instantly to the sound of the naval bombardment, forced the march, himself at the head. Having reached the crest of Sari Bair, the dominating ground that was the ANZAC objective, “the scene which met our eyes was a most interesting one. To my mind it was the vital moment of the [campaign].” He could see warships offshore and, in the foreground, a party of Turks of the 9th Division running towards him. They told him that they were out of ammunition and he ordered them to lie down and fix bayonets. “At the same time I sent [my] orderly officer … off to the rear to bring up to where I was at the double those men of the [57th Regiment] who were advancing [behind me] … When the men fixed their bayonets and lay down … the enemy lay down also … It was about 10:00 hours when the 57th Regiment began its attack.”

  The Australians had seen Kemal on the crest and fired at him, without effect. Their failure to hit him and to push forward to the top in those minutes may indeed be judged “the vital moment of the campaign,” for Kemal, as soon as his troops were to hand, began a series of counter-attacks against the Australian bridgehead that lasted until nightfall. Several high points taken earlier in the day were lost and from little of the line held did the ANZAC positions dominate the Turks. Almost everywhere they were overlooked, and a constant rain of enemy bullets sent a steady stream of wounded back to the narrow beach, passing, as they limped or were carried down, an only slightly more numerous stream of reinforcements coming up to replace them. That scene, wounded down, fresh troops up, was to be repeated every day the campaign lasted and remained every ANZAC’s most abiding memory of those precipitous hillsides.

  By 4 May both sides at ANZAC were exhausted. The Turks had lost 14,000 men, ANZAC nearly 10,000. After a final attack on 4 May, Kemal recognised that the enemy was too tenacious to be driven into the sea, and ordered his men to dig in. The line when finished enclosed an area a thousand yards deep, a mile and a half around the perimeter, the whole canted upwards at an angle of forty-five degrees, where the surface was not actually perpendicular. The scene reminded ANZAC’s chief cipher officer “of the cave dwellings of a tribe of large and prosperous savages who live on the extremely steep slopes of broken sandy bluffs covered with scrub.”

  On the lower ground at Cape Helles, the days after the landing had also been filled with savage fighting, as the 29th Division, and the French withdrawn from Kum Kale, struggled to connect the beachheads and push the line inland. On 26 April, the castle and village of Sedd el-Bahr were captured and next afternoon there was a general advance, the Turks locally having retreated exhausted from the scene. The objective was the village of Krithia, four miles inland. A deliberate assault was made on 28 April, known as the First Battle of Krithia, and another on 6 May. Neither reached the village, despite the arrival of an Indian brigade from Egypt and parts of the Royal Naval Division. By 8 May the British were stuck just short of Krithia, on a line that ran from Y Beach to a little north of S Beach, three miles from Cape Helles.

  There it remained throughout an unbearably hot summer, balmy autumn and freezing early winter. The War Council, despite opposition from the French and within its own ranks, sent more troops to Egypt and the base on Lemnos, first one and then three more Territorial Divisions, then three Kitchener divisions. The French also added, reluctantly, to the expeditionary corps, and in August the 2nd Australian Division and 2nd Mounted Division were sent to Lemnos. To break the stalemate, General Sir Ian Hamilton decided on a fresh amphibious assault north of ANZAC at Suvla Bay. It took place on 7 August and a bridgehead was quickly seized. Mustapha Kemal, now appointed to command all Turkish troops in the northern sector, was soon on the scene, however, rushing reinforcements to the heights with the same determination to pen the Allies close to the sea as he had shown three months earlier at ANZAC. By 9 August he had succeeded and no addition of force by the British—the hard-tried 29th Division was brought up by sea from Helles—could gain ground. The attackers and defenders dug in and Suvla Bay became simply the third shallow and static enclave maintained by the Allies on the Gallipoli peninsula. The Turks now had fourteen divisions in place against an exactly equal number of Allied which were more and more obviously doing no good at great cost. There had been calls within the Dardanelles Committee of the War Council for evacuation earlier. In November they became overwhelming. Kitchener, arriving on a personal reconnaissance, was persuaded by General Sir Charles Monro, who had succeeded the discredited Hamilton, that evacuation was inevitable, and a freak storm, which drowned soldiers in their trenches and wrecked many of the beach facilities, concluded the arguments. Between 28 December and 8 January 1916, the garrison began to slip away, little troubled by the Turks who had failed to detect that a complete evacuation was in progress. By 9 January, ANZAC, Suvla and Cape Helles were empty. The great adventure was over.

  The Turks, who bothered neither to bury nor count their dead, had probably lost 300,000 men killed, wounded and missing.61 The Allies had lost 265,000. The 29th Division had lost its strength twice over, while the New Zealanders, of whom 8,566 served on the peninsula, recorded 14,720 casualties, including wounded who returned two or three times.62 Yet of all the contingents which went to Gallipoli, it was the Australians who were most marked by the experience and who remembered it most deeply, remember it indeed to this day. Citizens of an only recently federated country in 1915, they went as soldiers of the forces of six separate states. They came back, it is so often said, members of one nation. The ANZAC ordeal began to be commemorated at home in the following year. Today the dawn ceremony on 25 April has become a sacred event, observed by all Australians of every age, and ANZAC cove has become a shrine. The Gallipoli peninsula, now preserved as a Turkish national park, in which a memorial erected by Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, as President of post-imperial Turkey, magnanimously recalls the sufferings of both sides, has reverted to nature, a beautiful but deserted remoteness on the Mediterranean shore. Yet not deserted by Australians. Few British make the journey; those who do, and find their way to ANZAC’s tiny and terrible battlegrounds at Lone Pine, Russell’s Top and Steele’s Post, never fail to be moved by the appearance of young Australians, men and women, who have trekked across Europe to see where their grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought and often died. Two-thirds of the Australians who went to the Great War became casualties and the first of the nation’s Great War heroes won their medals in the two square miles above ANZAC cove. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren often bring those medals back with them to Gallipoli on their pilgrimage, as if to reconsecrate the symbols of the ANZAC spirit, a metaphor for that of the nation itself, on sacred soil.

  Yet nothing at Gallipoli can fail to touch the emotions of those who descend from the soldiers of any nation that struggled there. The village of Kum Kale, under the walls of the medieval fortress, has disappeared but the overgrown cemetery of Muslim headstones remains to mark the furthest limit of the French advance of 25 April. The war cemetery above W Beach is full of the dead of Lancashire Landing, while at Sedd el-Bahr the Dublin and Munster Fusiliers lie in graves only a few yards above the water’s edge where they gave their lives for a state many of their countrymen, at Easter 1916, would confront with rebellion. Most poignant of all Gallipoli memorials, perhaps, is that of the white marble column on the Cape Helles headland, gl
impsed across the water from the walls of Troy on a bright April morning. Troy and Gallipoli make two separate but connected epics, as so many of the classically educated volunteer officers of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force—Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Arthur Asquith, the Prime Minister’s son, and the poet, Rupert Brooke, dead of blood-poisoning before the landing—had recognised and recorded. It is difficult to say which epic Homer might have thought the more heroic.

  SERBIA AND SALONIKA

  Gallipoli, though it succeeded eventually in attracting fourteen of Turkey’s thirty-six Nizam (first-line) divisions away from potential deployment to the Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Caucasian fronts, had failed as a military campaign. It had failed to open a supply route through the Black Sea to Russia’s southern ports. It had also failed in its secondary purpose, the bringing of relief to Serbia. That beleaguered country’s survival, always conditional upon its enemies’ preoccupations elsewhere, had been prolonged by the opening of the Gallipoli campaign and by the entry of Italy into the war, itself hastened by the landings at the Dardanelles. As the Gallipoli vision faded, however, so too had the hopes pinned on its expected subsidiary effects, including encouraging Greece to join the Allies and deterring Bulgaria from joining the Central Powers. The Turks’ containment of the Suvla Bay landing in August swung neutral opinion decisively the other way in each case. Bulgaria had a strong local interest in siding with Germany, since the Macedonian territory it had lost, after the briefest possession, at the end of the Second Balkan War in 1913 had gone to Greece and Serbia. The Allies, as suitors and protectors respectively of those two countries, would not, Bulgaria recognised, assist in its return. The Germans, on the other hand, could. The magnitude of their victory at Gorlice-Tarnow in May impressed the Bulgarians, moreover, and a month later they entered into negotiations.63 The Allies suddenly forgot their commitment to Serbia and on 3 August offered Bulgaria its desired share of Macedonia after all. The offer, however, came too late. The dual stalemate on the Italian and Gallipoli fronts convinced the King and political leadership of Bulgaria that their best interests lay in alliance with the Central Powers rather than Britain, France and Russia—warm though Russia’s patronage of Bulgaria had traditionally been—and on 6 September 1915 four treaties were signed. The terms included financial subsidy and future transfer of territory at Serbia’s expense; more critically and immediately, Bulgaria undertook to go to war against Serbia within thirty days. The purpose of the campaign, in concert with Germany and Austria, was “decisively to defeat the Serbian army and to open communications with Istanbul via Belgrade [the capital of Serbia] and Sofia [the capital of Bulgaria].” It was at once transmitted by Falkenhayn to Mackensen, the victor of Gorlice-Tarnow, who proceeded to assemble an army. Serbia ordered general mobilisation on 22 September. A fruitless effort was made to draw Romania into the war but, unlike Bulgaria, its sympathies lay with the Allies. Meanwhile, Colonel Hentsch, whose report from the Marne battlefield had brought about the entrenchment of the Western Front a year earlier, made a survey of the Serbian theatre as a preliminary to drawing up invasion plans.

  Since the failure of the second Austrian offensive in December 1914, the Serbian army had remained deployed on the northern and eastern frontiers. Mackensen’s plan was to extend the front of attack far south, where Bulgaria could force the Serbs to dissipate their numbers in the defence of Macedonia. The Serbs had only eleven weak divisions, particularly weak in artillery. Against them the Bulgarians could deploy six divisions, the Austrians seven, and the Germans ten, twenty-three in all. All but one of the German divisions were regular formations, belonging to the Eleventh Army, which had led the Gorlice-Tarnow breakthrough and would be brought down to the Danube, under the command of von Gallwitz, initiator of the Namur operation, by rail.64

  The odds overwhelmingly disfavoured the Serbs, fighting though they would be in the difficult terrain of their own country and behind wide and unbridged rivers—the Sava, the Danube, the latter a mile wide—at the frontiers. Voivode Putnik disposed of 200,000 men, of very varying quality, Mackensen of 330,000, with 1,200 guns to the Serbs’ 300. Serbia’s only hope of altering the balance lay in attracting Allied troops into the Balkans, via the Greek port of Salonika. That project had recommended itself to the French as early as November 1914 and actually underlay the inter-Allied discussions which resulted in the decision to land at Gallipoli.65 In the hope that an Allied intervention might now allow them to defeat the Bulgarians in the south before the Germans and Austrians developed their attack in the north, the Serbs made a plea to the Allies to review the initiative once more. The British, still hoping to bribe the Bulgars into inactivity, declined to do so, urging Serbia to surrender the Macedonian territory they coveted. That price was one too high for Serbia to pay, even though disaster stared it in the face. An inducement to undertake the Salonika project now came from an unexpected direction. On the day Bulgaria mobilised, the Greek Prime Minister, Eleutherios Venizelos, advised the British and French governments that if they would send 150,000 troops to Salonika, he was confident of bringing his country into the war on their side, under the terms of an existing Serbo-Greek treaty.

  Venizelos, “the lion of Crete,” who had won the independence of his island from Turkey in 1905, would have been a large man in any country and absolutely dominated the politics of the small Greek kingdom. He was the standard bearer of the “Great Idea”—the national reunion of the Greek-speaking communities of the Aegean and its hinterland at Turkey’s expense—and believed equally in the necessity of the Allies’ support to achieve it and in the likelihood of their eventual victory. He therefore viewed the organisation of aid to Serbia as both realistic and essential. At his persuasion, Britain and France agreed to send troops to Salonika at once, first a token force, later the 150,000 troops that, by his interpretation of the Serbo-Greek treaty, would justify Greece ending its neutrality. He had, however, overestimated the strength of his position at home. King Constantine was not only the Kaiser’s brother-in-law but believed his kingdom’s interests best served by preserving its neutrality. On 5 October he dismissed Venizelos from office. Venizelos would return to politics in October 1916, form a government at Salonika which Britain would recognise as legitimate and, after Constantine’s abdication in June 1917, resume the premiership with popular support. In the autumn of 1915, however, none of that could be foreseen. Meanwhile, the Allies took matters into their own hands. Greece, as a neutral without the means to resist, was obliged to acquiesce in the arrival of a Franco-British (and later also Russian) expeditionary force, formed in part by withdrawals from Gallipoli, in the transformation of Salonika into a vast Allied base and in the despatch in October of an Allied advance guard into Serbian Macedonia.

  The campaign in Serbia, 1915

  Its arrival came too late to assist the Serbs. On 5 October the Germans and Austrians began a bombardment across the Sava and Danube, followed by the bridging of both rivers on 7 October. Rough weather and Serbian fire destroyed some pontoons but the Austrian Third and German Eleventh Armies managed to secure footholds nonetheless and on 9 October entered Belgrade. Mackensen’s plan, after gaining his lodgement, was to envelop the Serbs by driving them southward into the centre of their country. As agreed a month earlier, the Bulgarians crossed the frontier from the east on 11 October, simultaneously sending troops south to oppose the British and French in Macedonia, while the Germans and Austrians pressed down from the north. The plan, logical on paper, took insufficient account of the terrain, the climate of the approaching Balkan winter or of the Serbs’ pre-modern capacity to endure hardship. The inhabitants of the central Balkans, materially the most backward region in Europe in 1915, were accustomed to seasonal privation, roadless habitat and extremes of temperature; to the hardihood that the snows and shortages of winter taught, their long history of insubmission to the Turks, and prosecution of the blood feud, added fierce tribal comradeship and contempt for danger. Hard as the Germans and Austrians pressed their pursuit
after the fall of Belgrade, they found it impossible to corner the Serbs against any obstacle. Thrice they seemed to have succeeded, notably at Kosovo, the battlefield where the Turks had extinguished Serbian independence in 1389, but the Serbs, encumbered as they were by tens of thousands of refugees and the train of only symbolically useful artillery they insisted on dragging behind them, disengaged and slipped away, towards the brother-Serb principality of Montenegro, Albania and the sea. Their old King Peter marched in the centre of the columns struggling towards the coast, while the enfeebled Voivode Putnik was carried by his devoted soldiers in a closed sedan chair along the snowbound tracks and over the mountain passes. Only an army of natural mountaineers could have survived the passage through Montenegro, and many did not, dying of disease, starvation or cold as they fell out of the line by the wayside. Of the 200,000 who had set out, however, no less than 140,000 survived to cross in early December the frontier of Albania, independent since 1913 and still a neutral, and descend into the gentler temperatures of the Albanian Adriatic ports. Thence by ship, mostly Italian, the survivors, with thousands of miserable Austrian prisoners forced to accompany them in the retreat, were transferred to Corfu. In their wake the Austrian Third Army took possession of Montenegro, while the Bulgarians, whom neither the Germans nor Austrians wished to see established on the Adriatic, turned back from the border to join in the counter-offensive against the Allied invasion of Macedonia.

  Other Bulgarian troops had already blunted the French and British effort to relieve pressure on the Serbs in Macedonia and by 12 December the two Allied divisions—the French 156th, the British 10th, both transferred from Gallipoli—that had crossed the Serbian frontier in October were back again on Greek territory. The British government, correctly judging that the Salonika project could serve no useful further purpose, now pressed the French to agree to the withdrawal of the Allied troops altogether. The French, in the grip of a domestic political crisis, demurred. Briand, who had replaced Viviani as premier in October, had been pro-Salonika from the start and made support for the project a test of loyalty to himself and his government. Moreover, he drew parliamentary support from the Radical Socialists, whose military favourite, Sarrail, commanded the Salonika army. To withdraw from Salonika would be to leave Sarrail without a command and unlikely to be given another, since Joffre feared and detested him. Briand therefore resuscitated his original arguments for the expedition: that it kept Greece and Romania neutral and that it posed a threat to the Austrian flank in the Balkans, which might be enlarged as later circumstances allowed. To those he added the argument that the Serbian army had not been destroyed and could, once reformed as a fighting force, be used (as it would be) on the Balkan front. As bait to Joffre, he elevated him to the command of French armies everywhere, not just in France alone; as bait to the Radical Socialists, he pointed out that Joffre must now support Sarrail because his elevation made his rival his subordinate. Between 1 and 6 December, at Calais, at GQG at Chantilly, and in London, the British and French political and military leaders took decisions for and against Salonika in rapid succession. The British nearly prevailed. Eventually, however, they were persuaded, by fear of provoking a collapse of Briand’s government and by the heartfelt plea of the Russians to sustain a western pressure in the eastern theatre of operations, to leave their troops in Salonika after all.66