Текст книги "Gallipoli"

Автор книги: Alan Moorehead

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By midnight the British no doubt might have gone forward again and perhaps overwhelmed the Turks in the tip of the peninsula. But there was still no senior officer ashore who was able to give them a lead. It was feared that an enemy counter-attack might start at any moment, and no one as yet had the slightest notion that they now outnumbered the enemy in Cape Helles by six to one. A dullness, a kind of mental paralysis, had followed the shock of the violent battles of the day, the unknown still loomed before them in the darkness.

The Turks in fact were in no position even to consider a counter-attack. Of their original 2,000 men who opposed the five Cape Helles landings half were casualties. A Turkish message captured on the following day gives an idea of their condition in the frontline trenches. ‘Captain,’ it runs, ‘you must either send up reinforcements and drive the enemy into the sea or let us evacuate this place because it is absolutely certain that they will land more troops tonight. Send the doctors to carry off my wounded. Alas alas, Captain, for God’s sake send me reinforcements because hundreds of soldiers are landing. Hurry. What on earth will happen, Captain?’

Nothing happened. Fusillades of shots broke out and died away. Men fired at shadows. A light rain began to fall. Confused, exhausted, isolated in the small circle of their own experiences, the soldiers waited for the morning.

Hamilton on board the Queen Elizabeth made a 5,000-word entry in his diary that night. In the course of it he wrote: ‘Should the Fates so decree, the whole brave Army may disappear during the night more dreadfully than that of Sennacherib; but assuredly they will not surrender; where so much is dark, where many are discouraged, in this knowledge I feel both light and joy. Here I write – think – have my being. Tomorrow night where shall we be? Well; what then; what of the worst? At least we shall have lived, acted, dared. We are half way through – we shall not look back.’

There were on the whole, he decided, fair grounds for optimism. Hunter-Weston should certainly be in a position to attack towards Achi Baba on the morrow. Reassuring messages had been coming in from Birdwood through the afternoon: he was engaged in heavy fighting all along the Anzac front, but 15,000 men had been landed there during the day. They should certainly be able to hold on. Not the least cheering news had come in from the French, who, remote from all the world, had been fighting a private battle of their own on the Asiatic side of the Straits. They had gone ashore a little late but in grand style near Orkanie Mound (the reputed tomb of Achilles), with a regiment of native African troops, and with a spirited bayonet charge had actually seized the ruined fortress of Kum Kale. That operation, at least, had been a complete success. The French, having completed their diversion, were ready now to be re-embarked and landed as reinforcements for the main offensive at Cape Helles. For a while Hamilton pondered the wisdom of this: since they had done so well should they not remain? But in the end he decided to stick to the plan; Kitchener had forbidden him to fight in Asia.[14]14
  The French actually forced the Turkish garrison at Kum Kale to surrender that night and when they were taken off on the following day they brought 450 Turkish prisoners with them.


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So then, in general, things were not too bad. Except at Kum Kale, none of the first day’s objectives had been taken, but they were ashore with nearly 30,000 men. Along the whole front there had been frightful casualties, but that was to be expected on the first day and no doubt the Turks had suffered heavily as well. At all costs they must push on both from Anzac and Helles as soon as day broke.

Heartened by this review of the situation Hamilton went to his cabin towards 11 p.m. and fell asleep.

He was woken an hour later by Braithwaite shaking him by the shoulder and calling, ‘Sir Ian. Sir Ian.’ When he opened his eyes he heard his chief-of-staff saying, ‘Sir Ian, you’ve got to come right along – a question of life or death – you must settle it.’

Putting a British warm over his pyjamas Hamilton crossed to the Admiral’s dining saloon, and there he found de Robeck himself, Rear Admiral Thursby, Roger Keyes and several others. A message had arrived from Birdwood asking for permission to abandon the whole Anzac position at Gaba Tepe.

Mustafa Kemal had kept up his fanatical attack on the Anzac beach-head all afternoon. At 4 p.m. the Dominion troops began to fall back towards the coast from the outlying positions they had taken in their first rush. By nightfall they were in a state of siege. But this alone had not caused the crisis in Birdwood’s lines: the fatal error of the original misplaced landing was beginning to take its effect. Birdwood had expected to seize a strip of coast at least a mile in length, instead of which he found himself in possession of one small beach barely 1000 yards long and 30 yards wide. Everything coming ashore had to be fed through this bottleneck. Earlier in the day a small jetty had been built. But in the afternoon the congestion on the shore became intense. Animals, guns, ammunition and stores of every kind were dumped together in confusion on the sand, and there was no question of dispersing them until more territory had been gained. The whole Anzac position was less than two miles long and about three-quarters of a mile deep. No one could get inland. Bridges and Godley, the two divisional commanders, and their staffs were crammed together in a gully a few yards from the beach, and the headquarters of the brigades were almost on top of them. Hospitals, signalling units, artillery batteries and even prisoners’ cages perched where they could among the rocks.

The wounded meanwhile were coming down from the hills in an endless stream, and were dumped in their stretchers in rows along the shore. Soon the whole of one end of the beach was covered with them, and there they lay, many of them in great pain, waiting to be taken off to the ships. While they waited a constant storm of bullets and shrapnel broke over their heads; and indeed, everyone on that crowded beach from generals to donkey drivers was under fire, for the Turks overlooked them from three sides. In desperation one of the officers in charge on the beach ordered every boat that came ashore to help in taking the casualties away, and this not only disorganized and delayed the disembarkation programme, it exposed the wounded to further suffering as well. Some were taken from transport to transport only to be sent away since there were no medical facilities on board; all the doctors and their staffs had gone to the shore.

On the front line – or rather at the changing points of contact with the enemy – the soldiers had had little opportunity of digging in. Their light trenching tools were not very effective among the rocks and the tough roots of the scrub, and at some places the slopes were too steep for them to dig in at all. They were in desperate need of artillery support, but because of the ragged nature of the country and the uncertainty of the front line there was very little the naval guns could do. By nightfall the situation was not yet critical but it was becoming so. It had been a long exhausting day, and the men were beginning to feel the intense psychological strain of always being looked down upon from above, their every move watched, their smallest gestures attracting the snipers’ bullets.

Many stragglers began to come down to the tiny beach on which already 15,000 men had been landed that day. For the most part these men were simply those who had lost touch with their units, and believing themselves isolated had returned to the only rallying point they knew. Some were in search of food and water. Others considered that they were entitled to a breather after a hard day. They dropped in exhaustion on any level piece of ground they could find, oblivious of the bursting shrapnel, and when they woke they were unable to return to the front because they could not find their way. These leaderless men added to the confusion and created an atmosphere of doubt and discouragement around the headquarters.

By nightfall, from almost every point of the bridgehead, desperate calls were coming in for more reinforcements, for ammunition, for artillery fire and for men to take the wounded away. The front line, it seemed, was breaking. It was in these circumstances that at 9.15 p.m. Bridges and Godley sent a message to General Birdwood aboard the Queen, asking him to come ashore at once. Birdwood, who had been on shore all afternoon, returned to the beach, and there he learned with astonishment that his two divisional generals, both Bridges the Australian, and Godley the Englishman, were in favour of an immediate evacuation.

Birdwood at first refused to accept this proposition, but he was persuaded as the conference went on: the troops were worn out and in the appalling terrain there was no reasonable chance of making any headway. If the Turks developed a counter-attack and a heavy bombardment next day the situation might get out of control.

Huddled together around candles in an improvised dug-out and with the rain falling outside and the wounded all about them, it cannot have been easy for the commanders to have taken a very hopeful view of the situation. In the end Birdwood sat down and dictated to Godley the following message for the Commander-in-Chief:

‘Both my divisional generals and brigadiers have represented to me that they fear their men are thoroughly disorganized by shrapnel fire to which they have been subjected all day after exhaustion and gallant work in the morning. Numbers have dribbled back from the firing line and cannot be collected in this difficult country. Even the New Zealand Brigade, which has only recently been engaged, lost heavily and is, to some extent, demoralized. If troops are subjected to shell fire again tomorrow morning there is likely to be a fiasco, as I have no fresh troops with which to replace those in the firing line. I know my representation is most serious, but if we are to re-embark it must be at once.’

This was the message which was placed before Hamilton when he was woken aboard the Queen Elizabeth at midnight that night.

The scene in de Robeck’s dining saloon was more oppressive than dramatic, and yet it has an oddly spot-lighted quality that sets it apart from any other such conference in the Gallipoli campaign: the General standing there in his pyjamas reading Birdwood’s message, the others gathered around him in silence, the orderlies waiting at the door. This was either to be the ending of the campaign or a new beginning. Just for these few moments the action of the battle stops like a moving picture that has been arrested on the screen, and one concentrates upon this single group. To gain time, Hamilton asked a question or two of the officers who had come from the shore, but they could tell him nothing more. Admiral Thursby, who was in charge of the naval side of the Anzac landing, gave it as his opinion that it would take several days to get the soldiers back into the ships. Braithwaite had nothing to say.

For Hamilton there was no escape; he alone had to take the decision and it had to be taken at once. Already all available boats had been ordered to stand by for the evacuation. Yet there was something missing in this unbearable proposition – some one hard definite factor that would enable him to make up his mind.

Turning to Thursby, Hamilton said, ‘Well then, tell me, Admiral, what do you think?’

Thursby answered, ‘What do I think? Well, I think myself they will stick it out if only it is put to them that they must.’

It was at this point that Keyes was handed a wireless message from Lieut.-Commander Stoker, the captain of the submarine AE 2, saying that he had penetrated the Narrows and had reached the Sea of Marmara. Keyes read the telegram aloud and turning to Hamilton added, ‘Tell them this. It is an omen – an Australian submarine has done the finest feat in submarine history, and is going to torpedo all the ships bringing reinforcements into Gallipoli.’

Upon this Hamilton sat down, and in a general silence wrote to Birdwood:

‘Your news is indeed serious. But there is nothing for it but to dig yourselves right in and stick it out. It would take at least two days to re-embark you as Admiral Thursby will explain to you. Meanwhile, the Australian submarine has got up through the Narrows and has torpedoed a gunboat at Cunuk.[15]15
  Chanak.


[Закрыть] Hunter-Weston despite his heavy losses will be advancing tomorrow which should divert pressure from you. Make a personal appeal to your men and Godley’s to make a supreme effort to hold their ground.

Ian Hamilton.

P.S. You have got through the difficult business, now you have only to dig, dig, dig, until you are safe.

Ian H.

In an instant, with this message the action starts moving forward again. Aboard the Queen Elizabeth, back on the beach at Anzac Cove, among the soldiers in the front line, everyone suddenly feels an immense relief, everyone perversely finds his courage all over again. Now that they have got to fight it out the dangers appear to be half as formidable as they were before.

It was the postscript of the letter which contained the required touch of inspiration, for when it was read out to the soldiers on shore they began at once, quite literally, to dig. Here was something definite to do; you dug your way down to safety. Officers and men alike, on the beach and in the hills, set about hacking at the ground, and as the hours went by and still no Turkish counter-attack came in, all the seaward slopes of the Sari Bair range began to resemble a vast mining camp. It was not long after this that the Australian soldiers became known as Diggers, and that name has remained with them ever since.

But there was, in fact, no possibility of a serious Turkish counter-attack at Anzac Cove that night or even on the following day. With 2,000 casualties in his ranks not even Mustafa Kemal could do more than launch a series of heavy raids that were never quite strong enough to push Birdwood into the sea. Everywhere along the front, at Cape Helles as well as Anzac, the first phase was already over. The moment of surprise had gone. Hamilton had declared his plan and Liman was reacting to it. Both sides now began to mass men on the two main battlefields, the Turks still convinced that they could throw the Allies into the sea, the Allies still believing that they could advance upon the Narrows. At this moment nobody could have persuaded either of the two generals or their soldiers that they were wrong. So long as their hopes held they were committed to a vast slaughter.

From this point onwards the element of the unexpected gradually dies away from the battle, the chances are calculated chances, the attacks and the counter-attacks foreknown, and only exhaustion can put an end to the affair.

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘The terrible “Ifs” accumulate.’

– Winston Churchill

THE news of the landing at Gallipoli was not released for publication until two days after the event, and it made no great stir in England. The Times in a leading article on April 27 put the matter very clearly: ‘The news that the fierce battle in Flanders which began on Thursday (April 22) is being continued with unabated fury is coupled this morning with the news that the Allied troops have landed in Gallipoli. But the novel interests of that enterprise cannot be allowed to distract us from what is, and will remain, the decisive theatre of operations. Our first thoughts must be for the bent but unbroken line of battle in the West.’

A new and terrible phase of the war in Europe had begun. In the very battle which The Times was describing the Germans used poison gas for the first time. This was soon followed by the news of the collapse of the Russian front in Galicia, and of the failure of the new British offensive in Aubers Ridge in France. The Aubers Ridge battle was typical of the kind of fighting which was to dominate the Western Front for the next three years: Sir John French attacked a German fortified line in full daylight on a two-mile front, and the action was not broken off until nightfall when 11,000 men had fallen. Not a single yard of ground was gained.

It was the lack of shells which was thought to be the cause of this disaster. ‘British soldiers,’ The Times said, ‘died in vain on Aubers Ridge on Sunday because more shells were needed. The Government, who have so seriously failed to organize adequately our national resources, must bear their share of the grave responsibility.’

But it was the loss of the Lusitania in the Atlantic which made the deepest impression on people in England through these weeks. The ship was sunk off the Irish coast on May 7, 1915 by the U-boat 20, and more than half of the 2,000 civilians on board were drowned. Now finally it seemed that the enemy was prepared to descend to any barbarity, and the ancient idea that civilians should not be involved in wars was gone for ever. From this point onwards the hatred of Germany in England rose to a pitch which was hardly equalled in the second world war, except perhaps at the height of the flying-bomb raids of 1944. Revenge, the desire to kill Germans, became a major object in itself, and with this there was an increasing uneasiness, a feeling that somehow the Asquith Government was mishandling things, and that the war, instead of being short and victorious, might be long and lost. If shells were needed to get the enemy out of his trenches in France, then why were there not enough of them? Why had the U-boats not been stopped? Why were the Zeppelins still coming over London? Compared to these issues, the novel enterprise against the Turks at Gallipoli seemed rather insignificant and very far away.

Then too very little information about the Gallipoli campaign reached the public during these early days. A full month went by before the Illustrated London News was able to publish photographs from the peninsula, and the official communiqués were not very helpful. From France a stream of soldiers, either wounded or on leave, returned to England, and their descriptions of the fighting in the trenches were in everybody’s mind. But Gallipoli was three thousand miles away and no soldier on leave ever got back as far as England, let alone Australia and New Zealand. To a great extent then it was left to the war correspondents to fill this gap.

Kitchener on principle was opposed to war correspondents, but he had, with some reluctance, permitted the English newspapers to send one man with the expedition, Mr. Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett. Ashmead-Bartlett was involved in difficulties from the moment of his arrival. Hamilton, though friendly, would allow him to send no messages until his own official cables had reached London, and this sometimes meant a delay of days. No criticism of the conduct of the operations was allowed by the censor. Nor could there be any indication of set-backs and delays. Ashmead-Bartlett’s lot seems really to have been a little too hard at times. He went ashore at Anzac Cove soon after the first assault wearing, for reasons best known to himself, a green hat, and was at once arrested as a spy. The Australians were about to shoot him when by chance a sailor whom he knew vouched for him. Soon afterwards he was nearly drowned when the ship in which he was travelling was torpedoed. The only other English correspondent at Gallipoli was a Renter man who was somewhat handicapped by being so short-sighted that he could only see a hundred yards.

Hamilton’s own despatches to Lord Kitchener tended at first to take an optimistic line. ‘Thanks to God who calmed the seas,’ he wrote on April 26, ‘and to the Royal Navy who rowed our fellows ashore as coolly as if at a regatta; thanks also to the dauntless spirit shown by all ranks of both Services, we have landed 29,000 upon six beaches in the face of desperate resistance.’ On April 27 he wrote again: ‘Thanks to the weather and the wonderfully fine spirit of our troops all continues to go well.’

Meanwhile a great deal had happened. On the night of the landing the destroyers on the Anzac front came in close and shone their searchlights on the cliffs to prevent the Turks from making a surprise raid in the darkness. Then in the morning the Queen Elizabeth and two other battleships each took a section of the enemy line and bombarded it so heavily that it seemed for a time that the hills were erupting like active volcanoes. Spotters went up in the kite balloons to a height whence they could see over the top of the peninsula, and with one lucky shot the Queen Elizabeth destroyed a freighter in the Narrows, seven miles away. The cruisers meanwhile came so near to the shore that the sailors could see the Turks running along the cliffs above, and the Turks in their turn sniped down on to the British officers standing on deck. There was very little the Turks could do to injure the warships, but they kept up an incessant artillery fire on the beach, and every boat that tried to reach the shore with stores and reinforcements was forced to run through a curtain of bursting shrapnel and machine-gun bullets. Under this barrage the Dominion soldiers fought out their battle for survival.

It was extremely savage fighting, for at this early stage neither side had any real idea of what they could or could not do, and consequently both commanders committed everything they had to the battle. Kemal was still convinced that he could drive the Allies into the sea before they had had time to dig in, and Birdwood was still determined to advance against him. Often the Turks charged directly into the Anzac line, and wild hand-to-hand fighting with the bayonet took place in the half-dug trenches. Three days of this went by before it became apparent to the opposing commanders that both their propositions were wrong: the Anzac soldiers could not be dislodged; equally they could not advance. Hardly a thousand square yards of territory had changed hands: and the bridgehead remained there, congested and confined, every part of it swept by fire from the heights above, but apparently immoveable. On the night of April 27, the fighting slackened, and both sides drew off to rest and gather their strength again.

Something of the same sort but on a wider front was happening at Cape Helles in the south. On the day after the landing the village of Sedd-el-Bahr fell, the scattered bridgeheads were joined together and the Turks drew back all along the line. Hamilton judged it to be absolutely vital to take Achi Baba before Liman von Sanders could bring reinforcements down to the toe of the peninsula, and on April 28, with the French on the right and the British on the left, a general forward movement began. It continued inland for a distance of about two miles against increasing opposition, and then came to a halt.

An extreme fatigue had now overtaken the soldiers. Many of them had been without sleep for two or even three nights, and their food, water and ammunition were running out. At Sedd-el-Bahr the River Clyde was firmly anchored to the shore, but the whole of the Allied position was under the fire of Turkish guns from across the straits and from the peninsula itself. The bulk of Hamilton’s forces was now on land, but the beaches still looked like the scene of a gigantic shipwreck with vast piles of stores and military equipment scattered about on every side, and until some order could be got out of this confusion – until the troops were rested and supplied – there was no possibility of renewing the advance. By April 28 all impetus was lost and the firing began to die away along the line.

Thus at the very outset the pattern of the Gallipoli campaign was established: the action, the reaction and the stalemate. The objective is set, the attempt is made, and it falls just short of success. Already Achi Baba had begun to dominate everybody’s mind. It loomed there on the skyline only a mile or two away, but as remote as Constantinople itself. It was not a spectacular hill in any way, for its height was only 709 feet and its sides sloped gently down to the Ægean through a pleasant countryside of olives and cypresses and scattered farms. But Hamilton was determined to take it. Once on the crest he believed that his guns would enfilade the straits as far as the Narrows, and the enemy line in the south would give way. On April 28 his position was particularly frustrating. He knew that time was running out. He saw the hill before him, and given another fresh division – perhaps even a brigade – he knew that he could have it. But there were no fresh divisions or brigades; everything he had was already committed to the battle, and for the time being the men were so worn out, so shocked and undermined by their casualties, that they could do no more. And so he returned to the questions which were destined to be endlessly repeated from this time onwards. Can he ask Kitchener for reinforcements? And even if Kitchener agrees to send them, will they arrive in time?

Even before the expedition had sailed there had been a misunderstanding about this matter of reinforcements. Kitchener’s attitude – and Hamilton was extremely conscious of it – seems to have been that he could spare so much and no more for Gallipoli, and Hamilton had better make the best of it. And so Hamilton’s modest requests had been rebuffed or had remained unanswered. Yet in the end Kitchener had relented. On April 6 he had sent a cable to Sir John Maxwell, the commander of the Egyptian garrison: ‘You should supply any troops in Egypt that can be spared or even selected officers or men that Sir Ian Hamilton may want for Gallipoli… This telegram should be communicated by you to Sir Ian Hamilton.’

Hamilton knew nothing of this. It is one of the mysteries of the campaign that this telegram was never sent on to him, or if it was the copy was lost. And so now on April 28, when all the plans of the first assault had miscarried, when the exhausted army lay stranded just below the crest of Achi Baba, desperately in need of shells and ammunition of every kind, several divisions of fresh men were standing idly by in Egypt.

It was not from Hamilton but from the Admirals that Kitchener had the first news that the situation was becoming critical. On the day after the landing Admiral Guépratte had sent a message saying that reinforcements were needed immediately, and de Robeck had followed this with another signal which made it clear that the Army was in serious difficulties. Churchill and Fisher seized on de Robeck’s message directly it arrived in the Admiralty in London, and they took it across to Kitchener at the War Office. The Field Marshal professed to be a good deal surprised. As far as he knew, he said, things were going well. Hamilton had not made any request for reinforcements. However, he at once instructed Maxwell in Egypt to embark the 42nd Division for the peninsula, together with an Indian Brigade – that same brigade of Gurkhas that Hamilton had pleaded for so unsuccessfully a month before. The French at the same time promised to embark another division at Marseilles.

On hearing this news Hamilton wrote in his diary, ‘Bis dat qui cito dat. O truest proverb! One fresh man on Gallipoli today was worth five afloat on the Mediterranean or fifty loafing around London in the Central Forces. At home they are carefully totting up figures – I know them – and explaining to the P.M. and the Senior Wranglers with some complacency that the 60,000 effective bayonets left me are enough – seeing they are British – to overthrow the Turkish Empire. So they would be if I had that number, or anything like it, for my line of battle. But what are the facts? Exactly one half of my “bayonets” spend the whole night carrying water, ammunition and supplies between the beach and the firing line. The other half of my “bayonets”, those left in the firing line, are up the whole night armed mostly with spades digging desperately into the earth. Now and then there is a hell of a fight, but that is incidental and a relief.’

While the Allies waited for their reinforcements a three days’ lull settled down on the battlefield. The digging went on. On the front line the spring flowers were blooming wonderfully, cornflowers and scarlet poppies, tulips and wild thyme. A storm blew up and for some hours the Army was cut off from the Fleet, its one lifeline to the outer world. But this was the last of the winter; the snow began to melt on Samothrace, and the sea lightened to its marvellous shade of transparent summer blue. On April 30 Hamilton transferred from the Queen Elizabeth to his command ship the Arcadian, and now for the first time his headquarters staff was gathered together. Some five thousand wounded men were sent off in hospital ships to Egypt, and the dead were buried.

Liman von Sanders was also carrying through a rapid reorganization. One of his Asiatic divisions was brought across the Straits in boats to the peninsula, and on April 30 two more divisions were sent down to him by sea from Constantinople. He could now count upon some seventy-five battalions against Hamilton’s fifty-seven, and Enver in Constantinople ordered a full-scale attack at Cape Helles. This was to be a ruthless affair: the soldiers in the first assault were to charge with unloaded rifles so that they would be forced to advance right up to the Allied trenches with the bayonet, and inflammable material was to be carried by the troops to enable them to bum the British boats on the shore. At ten p.m. on May 1, the three days of comparative silence was broken by a Turkish artillery bombardment along the whole length of the line at Cape Helles, and immediately afterwards the enemy infantry came over the top.

There never was any hope for soldiers attacking in such circumstances in 1915, whether in Gallipoli or France or anywhere else, and it is impossible to follow the confused events of the next week without a feeling of despair at the useless waste. For three days the Turks kept it up, and then when they had gained nothing, when their stretcher-bearers came out with the Red Crescent to gather up their wounded and bury the dead, it was Hamilton’s turn.