Текст книги "Gallipoli"

Автор книги: Alan Moorehead

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

MUSTAFA KEMAL kept a record of his own activities during the campaign, and it is quite unlike anything else that has been written about Gallipoli. It is a kind of day book, half pamphlet and half military history, a mixture of the intensely egoistical and the very practical. Long arid passages about the movements of regiments are followed by outbursts of almost childish jingoism (the equivalent of the Allies’ ‘One of our men is worth half a dozen Turks’). At times he breaks off to moralize: ‘What a fine mirror history is… In great events which pass to the bosom of history how clearly do the conduct and acts of those who take an active part in these events show their moral character.’ There is a strong suggestion throughout that the other commanders are wrong while he is right, and his approach to all but a few of his superior officers is at once obsequious and contemptuous. Yet he argues very closely, he always sees the battle from a fresh point of view, and he is very precise about such things as dates and place-names and the movements of troops.

There is no reason to think that this document has been edited or changed by others with an eye to the General’s later career as the dictator of Turkey; the original notebook is preserved by the Historical Branch of the Turkish General Staff at Ankara, and most of it is filled with Kemal’s own handwriting in the fine arabic script which he later abolished in Turkey in favour of the more practical and much less beautiful Latin alphabet. The rest of the notebook has been dictated to an assistant either on the battlefield itself or shortly afterwards.

There is one very interesting passage dealing with the period immediately before the Suvla landing. As so often happened, Kemal was involved in a dispute with his commanding officer – in this case Essad Pasha, the Corps Commander opposite Anzac. It had been decided to extend Kemal’s divisional front in the north of the Anzac bridgehead so as to take in part of a ravine known as Sazlidere. Kemal at once protested that this was too much responsibility for him to undertake. He went on and on about it, writing letter after letter (which he quotes) to Corps Headquarters. Essad took the line that this was all very unimportant, but, since Kemal wished it, he would remove the area from the 19th divisional front and take it under his own command. This did not suit Kemal at all. He replied that the Sazlidere area was so important that it must be put under a strong independent command; did they not realize that it was quite possible for the enemy to advance by day up to the very foot of Sari Bair under the cover of this deep ravine? Essad answered that he was in feet establishing an independent command from Suvla to the north of Anzac, and a German officer was coming out to take charge of it. The dividing line between his and Kemal’s command would be the Sazlidere ravine – or at any rate the upper part of it, since the mouth was already occupied by the enemy.

Once again Kemal protested; a dividing line between two commands, he said, was always the weakest point. The responsibility for Sazlidere must be made perfectly clear, and strong forces posted there. Essad was growing weary of the argument. ‘Little valleys like this,’ he wrote, ‘cannot be inclusive or exclusive of either side.’ However, he agreed to come down one day with his chief-of-staff to survey the position. Kemal led them to his advance headquarters on a plateau known to the British as Battleship Hill, and from there they looked down, as from an aircraft, at the coastline to the north of Anzac, the salt lake glistening in the distance by the sea, the empty bay at Suvla, the hills to the east, and in between, the flat plain reaching up to the tangle of foothills around Sazlidere at their feet. The three crests of Sari Bair – Chunuk Bair, Hill Q and Koja Chemen Tepe – with their apparently unclimbable slopes, rose up above them immediately to their right.

Kemal reports the discussion that followed in these words: ‘Seeing this view, the Chief-of-Staff of the Corps said, “Only raiding parties could cross this ground.”

‘The Corps Commander turned to me and said, “Where will the enemy come from?” Pointing with my hand in the direction of Ari Burnu, and along the whole shore as far as Suvla, I said, “From here”.

‘ “Very well, supposing he does come from there, how will he advance?” Again pointing towards Ari Burnu, I moved my hand in a semi-circle towards Koja Chemen Tepe. “He will advance from here,” I said. The Corps Commander smiled and patted my shoulder. “Don’t you worry, he can’t do it,” he said. Seeing that it was impossible to convince him I felt it unnecessary to prolong the argument any further. I confined myself to saying, “God willing, sir, things will turn out as you expect”.’

In short, Kemal had anticipated the general lines of Hamilton’s attack – the landing at Suvla, the advance up Sazlidere and the neighbouring ravines to the crests of Sari Bair – and perhaps it was only human that Kemal later should have written in his journal: ‘When from the 6th August onwards the enemy’s plans turned out just as I expected and tried to explain, I could not imagine the feelings of those who, two months before, had insisted on not accepting my explanations. Events were to show that they had been mentally unprepared and that due to insufficient measures in the face of hostile action, they had allowed the whole situation to become critical and the nation to be exposed to very great danger.’

From the British point of view the important thing was that Kemal at this stage had no power to enforce his ideas, and while he fumed and complained on Battleship Hill all the broken ground from Sazlidere to the north-east remained virtually unoccupied by the Turks, and the Suvla plain was left to the care of only three weak battalions. However, the German officer arrived to take command of the area, a Major Willmer of the Bavarian cavalry, a tall, spare figure with a duelling scar on his cheek, and he proved to be a very capable man indeed. When the salt lake dried up in July, Willmer saw that it was no use posting his 1,800 men along the coast, since there was no hope of preventing an enemy landing there. Just two outposts were left beside the sea: one of them on a patch of rising ground known as Hill Ten, to the north of the salt lake, and the other at Lala Baba, a 200-foot hillock between the salt lake and the bay. In the event of a landing being made, these men were told to resist as long as they could, but not to get cut off: they were to retire to the hills some three miles inland where the bulk of the little force was entrenched. And there, somehow or other, Willmer hoped to hold on until help reached him from Bulair in the north.

At the end of July Willmer received the warning issued to all Turkish army commanders that an enemy offensive was to be expected at any time, and he took care to conceal his men as much as possible by day and to push on with the digging of his entrenchments by night.

On August 6 the Major went down to the coast to inspect his outpost at Lala Baba, and it was there, late in the afternoon, that he heard the tremendous barrage of guns starting up at Anzac. Shortly afterwards he received an order from Liman to send one of his battalions there. The men were put on the road, but Willmer himself remained at Lala Baba to watch the horizon for any sign of approaching enemy ships. He saw the crimson sun go down on a flat and empty sea, and then, giving orders to his men to remain in instant readiness through the night, he rode home to his headquarters in the hills. He had hardly arrived there when he had word from Lala Baba that enemy soldiers were coming ashore on the beach below them in the darkness. At once he sent off a signal to Liman asking for the return of the battalion which was on the march to Anzac. Liman refused, and Willmer was now left with a force of less than 1,500 men to hold the whole area around Suvla Bay.

The night was pitch dark, and for some time the outpost at Lala Baba could not make out what was going on. Had they been able to see out to sea they would have been much more alarmed than they were, for the British fleet had carried through the first part of the plan with remarkable timing. There were three echelons: the 10,000 men from Imbros who, in three brigades, were to make the first landing, one of them inside the bay and the other two on the open beach to the south of it, and then, following on behind, the 6,000 men from Mytilene and the 4,000 from Mudros. Precisely at 9.30 p.m. the leading destroyers in line abreast came to a stop five hundred yards out from B Beach – the beach to the south of the lake – and quietly eased their anchors into the sea. The beetles and the picket boats which they had been towing were then cast off and made towards the shore.

At Lala Baba the Turks held their fire, for they could still see nothing, and in a fresh and gentle breeze the boats ran up to the beach and dropped their ramps on the sand. Within a few minutes some 7,000 men had walked ashore without getting their feet wet, and they were disturbed only by a single rifle shot which killed a sailor on the beach. As they marched inland for half a mile, two Turkish sentries rose in the darkness, fired their rifles and fled, but there was no other opposition; the invaders were in possession of an empty countryside.

But now a red flare went up from Lala Baba on their left, and the two battalions of Yorkshire soldiers who were advancing in that direction came under heavy rifle fire. This was the first time that Kitchener’s new civilian army had faced the enemy, and the conditions were very difficult: they had been on their feet for seventeen hours, they could see hardly more than a yard or two ahead, and they were under orders to use only their bayonets until the day broke. A third of the men and all but three of their officers were hit, but the remainder kept trudging on until they had driven the Turks off the top of the hill and had pursued them down to the salt lake on the opposite side. It was now midnight, and the survivors looked around for the third brigade which was supposed to have landed inside the bay, at a place called A Beach, and to have kept a rendezvous with them at Lala Baba. But of these others there was nothing to be seen; and so the men sat down to wait.

The Navy had been all too well justified in their dislike of the unknown waters in the bay. In the darkness the landing craft had lost their way, and those which had not fouled hidden reefs had come ashore at least a thousand yards to the south of the place where they were intended to be. It was not until well after midnight that the first troops of this third brigade began to line up on the beach, and nobody knew quite where they were or what they were supposed to do. However, the moon came up at 2 a.m. and by that pale light one column made a dash at a hill which they imagined to be Hill Ten (and which was not), while another struggled up the slopes of Kiretch Tepe to the north, and still another sat down and waited on the beach. As day began to break at 4.30 a.m. the advance everywhere had stopped. Hill Ten had still not been attacked or even found, disorganized groups were firing raggedly at any target that happened to present itself, and the utmost confusion spread along the shore. Officers everywhere were shouting to one another for information, arguing over their orders and sending off messengers who never returned. It was not the enemy fire that defeated then, for it was not very heavy, but their own physical exhaustion, the unfamiliar maps which seemed to bear no relation to the landscape, and the absence of anyone in high authority to give a clear command.

General Hammersley had come ashore soon after midnight, and he spent the remaining hours of darkness vainly trying to find out what was going on. It was not until dawn that he realized that, far from reaching the hills, his soldiers had merely seized the two arms of the bay.

General Stopford was in somewhat easier circumstances. On the voyage across from Imbros he had confided to Admiral Christian his misgivings about the whole adventure, but his spirits rose as they approached the coast. Very little firing was to be heard on shore, and it even seemed that the landing had been made unopposed. In the very early hours of the morning the Jonquil dropped anchor just inside the bay. The night was warm, and the General had his mattress brought up on deck close under the bridge; and there he went to sleep. No one was sent ashore to inquire for news, no one came out to the Jonquil from the beach, and no message was sent to G.H.Q. at Imbros. It was not until 4 a.m. that Commander Unwin, who had been very busy through the night, came on board to urge the Admiral that the monitors should open fire to hearten the troops who were still held up in confusion on the shore.

On Imbros Hamilton and his staff were finding the absence or news almost insupportable. The General kept pacing back and forth from his hut to the signals tent, and although Anzac and Helles sent him their news, from Suvla there was not a word. The cable ship Levant had gone off with the invasion fleet, paying out its cable on the way, and it was arranged that the first message that was to come through would announce that the troops were ashore. There was a dial face in the signals tent at the Imbros end of the cable, and through the midnight hours the headquarters staff kept watching it. At last at 2 a.m. the needle on the dial began to move and a telegraphist spelt out the message: ‘A little shelling at A has now ceased. All quiet at B.’ There was no signature – it was simply the signaller on board the Levant passing a private message to his mate at the Imbros end – but it did at least serve to reassure the Commander-in-Chief’s mind. ‘Now, thank God,’ he wrote, ‘the deadliest of the perils is past. The New Army are fairly ashore.’

It was quite true. Nearly 20,000 men had been landed and the casualties had been very light. This time Liman had been caught completely off his guard. It was also unfortunately true that at this moment all three senior British generals – Hammersley at Suvla, Stopford in the Jonquil and Hamilton on Imbros – were in almost total ignorance of what was really happening, and the hills which they (or Hamilton, at any rate) had so much hoped to have by dawn, were still several miles away. But even so the situation was not too dangerous; the confusing darkness of the night had gone, no Turkish reinforcements had yet arrived, and there was still time for the Suvla troops to bring help to Birdwood in his frightful struggle for Sari Bair. All depended on the dispatch with which Stopford disentangled his forces on the shore and got them moving inland.

It had been Stopford’s original intention to go ashore with his headquarters on the morning of August 7, but he changed his mind when he heard that his signals unit had not yet arrived. He could better control the battle, he decided, from the decks of the Jonquil, and it was here, soon after daybreak, that he received a visit from Brigadier-General Hill, the commander of the 6,000 troops who had just come in from Mytilene. Hill was not the least bewildered man at Suvla that morning. For nearly a month he and his men had been incarcerated in their transports, and they might have been living on the moon for all they knew about Gallipoli. On the previous day they had received orders to move from their peaceful anchorage in Mytilene harbour. They had no idea where they were going, no plan had been given to the Brigadier, and no map had been shown to him. He was surprised therefore to wake on this hot sunny morning and find himself on a strange coast with hostile shells falling into the sea around him; and he now wished to know what he was to do.

Stopford, on the advice of Unwin, was inclined to think that Hill had better get his ships out of the shellfire in Suvla Bay and go round to the safe outer beach beyond Nibrunesi Point where he could attach himself to General Hammersley for the time being. This would mean that the men would have to march for a mile or more under enemy fire to get back to their appointed landing-place inside the bay; still, it could not be helped. The two generals were still debating the matter when Keyes burst in upon them. Keyes had observed the hesitations and delays on the shore, and he had come across from the Chatham ‘in a fever of resentment at these leisurely proceedings’ to say that shellfire or no shellfire Hill should land his men inside the bay at once. It was decided, however, that another change of plan would cause too much confusion, and so Hill went off with his men around Nibrunesi Point. Arriving on shore his orders were instantly countermanded by Hammersley; instead of marching north towards Hill Ten he was now to march east towards a rise known as Chocolate Hill, where the Turks were still entrenched. Later on these orders were again cancelled. Still later the plans were altered again.

It was typical of much else that happened on this day. Indeed, it requires a more than average interest in the minutiae of military history to follow the marches and the counter-marches that now began, the stream of orders, each one cancelling out the last, the misunderstandings between the various headquarters, the long silences and the sudden frantic changes of front. The best part of two divisions had now come ashore, the 11th under Hammersley and the 10th under Mahon, and hardly anyone was where he was supposed to be. Companies, battalions and even whole brigades were hopelessly mixed up together, and any resolute action that did occur was usually the work of some junior commander who took affairs into his own hands on a limited front.

General Hammersley, now perched on the end of Nibrunesi Point, was feeling the heat very much, and he was further upset when a shell fell on his headquarters and killed several of his staff. Three times in the course of the morning he changed his plans, and no sooner had an order gone out than it was followed by another giving other objectives with other combinations of troops and at a later time. About 7 a.m. there was a rush for Hill Ten, which had been found at last, and the hundred odd Turks who were defending it were driven off the top. Now was the time to turn east to the hills – in particular to seize Chocolate Hill and the long spur running out into the plain from Anafarta Sagir, and then to move on to the heights of Tekke Tepe on the ridge beyond. Instead, many of the troops went streaming north in the general direction of Kiretch Tepe, and even here the impetus soon expended itself. Here and there a brigadier or a colonel was ready enough to go forward provided someone gave him an order, but even in this there was another complication. The maps which had been issued at the last minute to the officers were marked in some instances with the Turkish names for the features on the plain. Hammersley’s orders, on the other hand, used the English names for these places; and so it sometimes happened that units advanced to quite the wrong objectives. Other commanders merely succumbed to what Keyes described as ‘the ghastly inertia’, and refused to move anywhere until their troops were rested. The heat was very great – about ninety degrees in the shade – and it was often too much for men who had been inoculated against cholera only two days before and whose water bottles had given out. Near the shore many hundreds went down to the sea to bathe.

In the bay at Suvla the scene was hardly less disordered than on the land. Everywhere the disembarkation programme was breaking down, partly because of the hidden reefs in the sea, and partly because a sudden thunderstorm lashed up the surface water for an hour or two. Not a single gun was landed on this day, and hardly fifty mules were got ashore. But the most serious deficiency was in the water supply. The Navy had never expected that it would have to provide for two whole divisions – it was thought that the soldiers would advance inland, where it was known there were many wells. Even so the situation might have been saved had not two of the water lighters grounded far out in the bay, and had not many of the soldiers, frantic with thirst, come crowding down to the shore. They were quite desperate, their tongues blackened, their faces smeared with dust and sweat, and they simply could not wait; they had to drink. Some waded into the sea and drank the salt water, others slashed the canvas hoses through which the watership Krini was pumping out her tanks to the shore. The warships did what they could; one destroyer captain cut out his water tank and sent it ashore along with his canvas bath and kept both full with his pumps, and later in the day all the other vessels in the bay were ordered to follow suit. But still it was not enough.

At dawn a juncture had been made with the Anzac bridgehead on the shore, and soon afterwards some of Birdwood’s signallers ran a telephone line around to Hammersley’s headquarters. In the middle of the morning a message came through on this line to say that from the heights of Anzac it had been observed that there were signs of a general retirement of the enemy on Suvla plain – carts had been seen making for the hills, guns were being moved back. Heartened perhaps by this, Hammersley got out orders for an advance which was to proceed at least as far as Chocolate Hill. But he was still only half convinced that he was not confronted by large enemy entrenchments, he was still in doubt about the position of his own forces, and so the orders which he gave were not very clear. At mid-day the attack had not started, and the brigadier who was supposed to be leading it was tramping back through the heavy sand to make sure that he understood his instructions. At last in the middle of the afternoon the advance began, but it was stopped almost at once as the General had decided on second thoughts to delay until 5.30 p.m. when he would be in a position to mount a stronger attack.

And so it goes on, hour after hour, an extraordinary scene in which 1,500 Turks with a few howitzers and not a machine-gun among them were harrying an army of 20,000 men backwards and forwards across the empty plain. The British soldiers were very inexperienced. Major Willmer remarked in a message to Liman that they marched ‘bolt upright’ without attempting to use the cover of the scrub, and he added, ‘No energetic attacks on the enemy’s part have taken place. On the contrary, the enemy is advancing timidly.’ But it was not a situation which could continue indefinitely, and he begged Liman to hasten the reinforcements which were coming down from Bulair in the north.

It was dusk on August 7 when at last the British began to move across the salt lake, but they did take Chocolate Hill. They took it very bravely, considering all the hesitations and frustrations of the day, and they went on for another quarter of a mile and took Green Hill as well. They were now within a mile or two of the main heights which were the object of the whole attack, and the Turkish outposts were streaming away before them. It so happened, however, that none of the three British brigadiers who were concerned in this action came forward with the leading troops. They remained two miles in the rear. And so the troops received no further orders; instead of pursuing the Turks they sat down and waited. When night fell all contact with the enemy had been lost.

The chain of command had now broken down entirely. General Hammersley could not have taken any resolute decision even if he had wished to do so, for he did not know that Chocolate Hill had been captured until well after midnight, and the news about Green Hill never reached him till the following morning. Stopford continued in virtual isolation aboard the Jonquil all day, and G.H.Q. at Imbros was even more out of touch. Hamilton, immensely relieved that the new army had got ashore, had naturally presumed that it would advance to the hills in the first light of the morning on August 7, and the second-hand news he received from Anzac and from ships returning from Suvla did, in fact, give him the impression that all was going well. It was, then, something of a shock when Stopford’s first message came in at mid-day. ‘As you see,’ it said, ‘we have been able to advance little beyond the beach.’ It hardly seemed possible. But Hamilton was reassured when he observed that the message had taken some time to reach him and dealt only with the situation as it was soon after daybreak on August 7; surely since then, he reasoned, the advance must have begun. But when no further message came in from the Jonquil he began to grow anxious. A little after 4 p.m. he sent off a signal to Stopford urging him to push on. To this there was no answer.

Thus at the end of the first twenty-four hours at Suvla there had been very little change; the troops were barely two miles inland and the generals were in exactly the same places – Hammersley on the beach, Stopford on the Jonquil and Hamilton on Imbros. The only really new factor was that the Turks, having inflicted some 1,600 casualties on the British, which was rather more than the total number of their own force, had retired and the Suvla plain was now empty.

There is something so mocking about this situation, something so wrong, that one feels that it is not explained by all the errors and mischances that had occurred: by the commander-in-chief pacing about his headquarters at Imbros when he might just as well have been asleep, by Stopford lying in bed at sea when he should have been wide awake on shore, by the landing of raw troops at night instead of experienced men at dawn, by the appointment of elderly inefficient commanders, by the excessive secrecy that had kept them so much in the dark, by the thirst and the heat and the uncharted reefs beneath the sea. In the face of so much mismanagement things were bound to go wrong, yet not so wrong as all this. Somewhere, one feels, there must be some missing factor which has not been brought to light – some element of luck neglected, some supernatural accident, some evil chain of coincidence that nobody could have anticipated. And yet it was quite unlike the April landing. One does not have the feeling that it was touch and go at Suvla, that some slight shifting of the pattern would have put things right again. There is instead a strong sense of inevitability; each event leads on quite inexorably to the next, and it cannot have mattered, one feels, whether Hamilton went to bed or not, whether Stopford got ashore or stayed aboard the Jonquil, whether the brigadiers marched in this or that direction – the results would have been just the same. Given this set of conditions everything was bound to continue to its fated end.

But that end was not nearly in sight as night fell on August 7. Nobody had given up hope: it was quite the other way about. A feeling of intense relief had followed the successful landing, and the generals were sure that given a little time to straighten things out they would be able to move on again.

The night was cold and absolutely still. Away to the south at Anzac the artillery was rumbling steadily, but at Suvla not a gun was fired. No attempt was made to push patrols forward either from Chocolate Hill or along Kiretch Tepe, and no contact was made with the enemy anywhere. Soon after 5 a.m. on August 8, when the blazing sun came up, the scene remained as it was on the previous evening; the plain was still empty, no sound of rifle fire was heard, and there were still no Turks on the heights of Tekke Tepe. Willmer had concentrated his men around Anafarta Sagir further to the south, certain that the real, concentrated blow of the British was about to fall on him at any moment.

Hammersley, in fact, had something of the sort in mind, and he set off early on this second morning at Suvla to consult his brigadiers. He was much discouraged, however, by what they told him; the soldiers, they said, were too tired to go on – and when the General heard nothing from Stopford he gave up the idea of making an advance.

Stopford’s actions during this morning of August 8 were almost as simple: a few minutes after 7 a.m. he signalled General Mahon on Kiretch Tepe to entrench. At 9.30 he sent a message of congratulation to his generals and at 10 he communicated his satisfaction to Hamilton. ‘Consider,’ he said, ‘Major-General Hammersley and troops under him deserve great credit for result attained against strenuous opposition and great difficulty.’ And he added, ‘I must now consolidate.’

Hamilton was baffled. What on earth was happening at Suvla? Over 20,000 men had now been on shore for more than twenty-four hours, and he knew from the reports of the Naval Air Service that there was no serious opposition in front of them. Stopford seemed quite contented, but still he did not push on. It had been estimated that the Turks would take about thirty-six hours to get their reinforcements down from Bulair, and now, on the morning of August 8, there were at the most six or seven hours to go. He sent for Colonel Aspinall and told him to get over to Suvla and find out what was going on.

Aspinall got his orders shortly before 6 a.m., and he at once went down to the docks at Imbros with Colonel Hankey, but it was not until 9.30 a.m. that they managed to find a trawler to take them to the mainland. Another two hours went by before they reached Suvla Bay, and there they surveyed with astonishment the scene along the shore. It was, they reported later, like an August Bank Holiday in England. Hardly a sound disturbed the quivering summer air. Many boats were bobbing about on the gentle swell in the bay, and on the beach naked troops were bathing in hundreds and tending their cooking fires. Inland beyond the salt lake there was perfect peace. No one was in a hurry, no one seemed to be very busy, unless it was the group of soldiers who were digging a large entrenchment along the coast. ‘You seem to be making yourselves snug,’ Hankey said to a staff officer standing by. ‘We expect to be here a long time,’ was the reply.