Текст книги "Gallipoli"

Автор книги: Alan Moorehead

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

The appointment of Sarrail was a devious affair with roots reaching back as far as the Dreyfus case. Sarrail, a Radical-Socialist, an anti-cleric, had been relieved of his command at Verdun by Joffre, but he was politically strong enough to force the French government to find him another appointment. And so he was to have this new independent command in the Near East. Joffre was not in a position to block the appointment, but he could delay and weaken it, and this he was already doing by the time Hamilton got his cable. The four French divisions, he insisted, were not to go to the Dardanelles until after the September offensive had been fought on the western front.

Hamilton got this news on September 14. The earliest date on which the new soldiers could arrive, Kitchener now told him, was mid-November. ‘Postponed!’ the entry runs in Hamilton’s diary. ‘The word is like a knell.’ There was worse to follow.

In the last week of September Bulgaria mobilized, and it was apparent that within a matter of days she would be marching with the Germans and Austrians against Serbia. There was only one way of bringing help to the Serbians, and that was by attacking Bulgaria through Greece. But the Greek government was now insisting that if she was to enter the war she must be supported by an Allied force at Salonika. There was not much time. Kitchener and Joffre agreed that two divisions, one French and the other British, must be sent from Gallipoli to Salonika at once. If necessary Hamilton would have to abandon Suvla and again confine himself to the bridgeheads at Anzac and Cape Helles.

This blow fell on Imbros on September 26, and Hamilton forced himself to take it philosophically. He wrote in his diary early in October, ‘At whose door will history leave the blame for the helpless, hopeless fix we are left in – rotting with disease and told to take it easy.’ But he loyally sent off the two divisions to Salonika and fitted them out as well as he could before they left.

By now, however, events had come to a crisis where two divisions could make little difference one way or another. Joffre’s offensive in the west failed with the loss of a quarter of a million men. Then on October 9 the Germans and Austrians fell on Belgrade, while on the following day the Bulgarians attacked Serbia from the east. The Allies’ force at Salonika was too small, too disorganized and too far away to do anything but to look on helplessly. And it was one more galling twist that the removal of the two divisions from Gallipoli had precisely the reverse effect on Greece to the one anticipated. Seeing Hamilton’s army reduced like this, King Constantine at once made up his mind that the Allies were about to abandon Gallipoli. He dismissed his anti-German Prime Minister, Venizelos, and decided upon a neutrality which, if not actively hostile to the Allies, was at least not helpful.

There was but one ray of hope for Gallipoli in all this. Keyes wanted the Fleet to assault the Narrows again. He had argued for it after the August battles had failed, he argued all through September, and with a new ally – Admiral Wemyss, the Commander-in-Chief at Lemnos – he was still arguing in October. De Robeck was still opposed but he allowed Keyes to draw up a new plan and propound it to a group of senior admirals at the Dardanelles. They were caught again in the old half-emotional dilemma. They felt deeply about the losses of the Army, they wanted to attack, and they again half believed that in the end the Admiralty would order them to do so. But still they could not clearly see how it was to be done. Eventually a compromise was decided upon: Keyes was to go to London and put the matter personally to the Admiralty and the War Cabinet.

But this for the moment was a side-issue, a single current moving against a turning tide. After the September offensive Joffre still withheld the four divisions earmarked for the Dardanelles, and the longer he delayed the more French opinion began to swing against the Asiatic landing altogether. With Serbia falling, Salonika appeared to be the more crucial strategic point for a new offensive. In London, too, Lloyd George and Carson,[28]28
  Carson resigned soon afterwards over the failure of the Government to send adequate help to Serbia. ‘The Dardanelles operations,’ he told the House of Commons, ‘hang like a millstone round our necks, and have brought upon us the most vast disaster that has happened in the course of the war.’


[Закрыть] the Attorney-General, were openly pushing their campaign against Kitchener, and the issue was rapidly narrowing down to a simple alternative: Salonika or Gallipoli, which was it to be? Hamilton’s army was now down to half its strength and the campaign was at a stalemate. Was it really worth while throwing good money after bad?

On October 11 Kitchener felt bound to acknowledge the pressure of these questions. He cabled Hamilton, ‘What is your estimate of the probable losses which would be entailed to your force if the evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula was decided upon and carried out in the most careful manner? No decision has been arrived at yet on this question of evacuation, but I feel I ought to have your views.’

When he read this Hamilton burst out, ‘If they do this they make the Dardanelles into the bloodiest tragedy of the world. I won’t touch it.’ Could they not understand that the Turks were worn out, that the Allied soldiers were reviving now in the cooler weather, that they had only to be supported at Gallipoli and they would get through? And what if a gale came up half way through the evacuation? It might cause a disaster only equalled in history by that of the Athenians at Syracuse.

The headquarters at Imbros was not the best of places in which to take calm decisions. Hamilton was suffering miserably from dysentery, and German aircraft had begun to raid the island. On this very day a quiverful of iron spikes had come rattling down about the General’s head.

In the morning, however, he sent off a sober reply. They must reckon on the loss of half the men, and all their guns and stores, he said. ‘One quarter would probably get off quite easily, then the trouble would begin. We might be very lucky and lose considerably less than I have estimated. On the other hand, with all these raw troops at Suvla and all these Senegalese at Cape Helles, we might have a veritable catastrophe.’

Privately Hamilton believed that the losses would be less than half – between 35 and 45 per cent. was his estimate – but his staff were in favour of the higher figure, and he adopted it to make his opposition to the evacuation absolutely clear. But there was more in Kitchener’s query than a balancing of estimates about evacuation: the whole question of Hamilton’s command was involved. Already there had been rumblings. On October 4 Kitchener had sent a private cable to Hamilton warning him that there had been a ‘flow of unofficial reports from Gallipoli’ adversely criticizing G.H.Q. at Imbros. Should they not make some changes, Kitchener suggested. Perhaps Braithwaite should come home.

Hamilton had indignantly refused. But it was clear now that he himself and everyone on Imbros were under fire.

Then on October 11, the same day that Kitchener had sent his cable about evacuation, the Dardanelles Committee approached the matter in an oblique but very definite way. They decided that reinforcements should be dispatched to the Near East, but they were not to go directly to Gallipoli; they were to be held in Egypt while a senior general, Haig or Kitchener himself – someone at any rate who was senior to Hamilton – went out and decided between Gallipoli and Salonika.

The truth was that Hamilton was diminishing fast in everybody’s estimation. He was the general who always nearly succeeded. He had badly mismanaged Suvla, and General Stopford, who had recently come home, was making some very serious charges about the interference of G.H.Q. in the battle. The headquarters staff, Stopford wrote in a report to the War Office, ‘lived on an island at some distance from the peninsula’ and had been greatly misinformed about the Turkish strength at Suvla. There was another factor. Hamilton was Kitchener’s man, and it was beginning to seem that Kitchener might be covering him up. The Committee waited now with some impatience to see whether anything hopeful or useful would come in reply to Kitchener’s cable. It chanced, too, that just at this time the German zeppelins were having a particular success in their raids on London: 176 people had been killed in two successive nights. Between the falling bombs on London and the falling spikes on Imbros everybody’s nerves were on edge.

But it was not the bombs, nor Stopford’s criticisms, not even the growing opposition to Kitchener and all his plans and protégés which was the immediate factor in the undoing of Hamilton’s reputation at this moment. It was an Australian journalist named Keith Murdoch. His entry into the explosive scene is one of the oddest incidents in the Gallipoli campaign.

The trouble had begun far back in April with Ashmead-Bartlett, the war correspondent who represented the London press at the Dardanelles. According to Compton Mackenzie, who was in a position to know, Ashmead-Bartlett was not liked at headquarters. He was the stranger in the camp, a solitary civilian among professional and amateur soldiers. He was never captivated by Hamilton as the others were, but remained instead the detached hostile critic. He resented the censorship at G.H.Q., he disagreed with all their plans, and, worst of all, he was for ever predicting failure. Things grew to such a pitch that on one occasion, according to Mackenzie, the officers at Corps Headquarters at Cape Helles went into hiding in the rocks when Ashmead-Bartlett approached to avoid having to ask him to lunch.

Despite its self-imposed discomfort and its devotion, Imbros was not a very inspiring place for an outsider. Of necessity it was a club. There was a disguised but inescapable atmosphere of privilege, of the old school and the old regiment, of breeding and manners. Hamilton found some of the most devoted of his admirers among the many young men of good family who as civilians had joined his staff. To strangers they sometimes conveyed an impression of superiority and complacency, and their good humour and politeness were often mistaken for dilettantism. No one questioned their courage; from Hamilton downwards senior officers made a point of deliberately and nonchalantly exposing themselves to enemy fire when they were at the front. Still, there was something lacking: a toughness, a roughness, the reassurance of the common touch. Among the troops it was rumoured that Hamilton wrote poetry in his spare time, and he was supposed to be very much under Braithwaite’s thumb. His charm, his integrity and his subtle intelligence were recognized by those who met him, but somehow these qualities did not work at a distance – and the soldiers were always at a distance. In brief, he seemed soft.

It was against these things that Ashmead-Bartlett, burning with his own ideas, waged his private war. Hamilton’s outward attitude to him was polite and helpful, but he felt privately that Ashmead-Bartlett had too much power and that his depressing attitude was damaging the expedition. Ashmead-Bartlett’s persistent theme was that the Army should have landed at Bulair, and with this Hamilton did not agree. Nor was he very encouraging when Ashmead-Bartlett came to him one day with the suggestion that the Turkish soldiers in the trenches should be induced to desert by the offer of ten shillings and a free pardon. ‘This makes one wonder,’ Hamilton wrote after the interview, ‘what would Ashmead-Bartlett himself do if he were offered ten shillings and a good supper by a Mahommedan when he was feeling a bit hungry and hard-up among the Christians.’ In May, when Ashmead-Bartlett went home on leave, Hamilton appointed Mackenzie to fill his place and tried to make the arrangement permanent, but neither Mackenzie nor the authorities in London were enthusiastic. Ashmead-Bartlett came back and was more glum and despondent than ever.

Mackenzie’s description of him at their first meeting is of ‘a slim man in khaki with a soft felt hat the colour of verdigris, a camera slung around his shoulders, and an unrelaxing expression of nervous exasperation.’

He ‘walked along the deck with the air of one convinced that his presence there annoyed everybody, and that we all wanted a jolly good dose of physic. Presently he came away from an interview with Sir Ian Hamilton, looking the way Cassandra must have often looked some three thousand years before. After telling me that the whole expedition was doomed to failure, and that he expected to be torpedoed aboard the Majestic (in which he was about to sail) he left the ship.’

Yet the really irritating thing about Ashmead-Bartlett was that he was so often right. He was torpedoed aboard the Majestic that same night. And there was indeed a great deal to criticize in the generals’ plans since they so frequently did end in disaster. Moreover, he could not be ignored. In London he had the ear of a number of important people in the cabinet, and however much he was disliked on Imbros the soldiers at the front were glad enough to see him, and he was often at the front. As a war correspondent, Ashmead-Bartlett was extremely capable.

He was still with the expedition and more exasperated than ever when at the conclusion of the August battles Murdoch arrived.

Murdoch was not really a war correspondent at all. He was on his way to London to act as the representative of various Australian newspapers there, and had been given a temporary official mission by his government to call in at Egypt and report upon the postal arrangements for the Australian troops. He was carrying letters of introduction from the Australian Prime Minister, Andrew Fisher, and the Australian Minister for Defence, Senator Pearce.

On August 17 Murdoch wrote to Hamilton from Cairo saying that he was finding it difficult to complete his inquiries in Egypt. He asked for permission to come to Gallipoli, and added, ‘I should like to go across in only a semi-official capacity, so that I might record censored impressions in the London and Australian newspapers I represent, but any conditions you impose I should, of course, faithfully observe… May I add that I had the honour of meeting you at the Melbourne Town Hall, and wrote fully of your visit in the Sydney Sun and Melbourne Punch;[29]29
  Hamilton had made a visit to Australia shortly before the war.


[Закрыть] also may I say that my anxiety as an Australian to visit the sacred shores of Gallipoli while our army is there is intense.’

Hamilton says that he was not much impressed at having been written up in the Sun and Punch, but he sent off the necessary permission and on September 2 Murdoch arrived. Hamilton, at their single meeting, found him ‘a sensible man’. He was to prove, however, much more than that: so far as Hamilton was concerned he was a very dangerous man.

Murdoch signed the usual war correspondent’s declaration saying that he would submit all he wrote to the censor at headquarters, and then made a brief visit to the Anzac bridgehead. On his return to Imbros he set up at the Press Camp, and there found Ashmead-Bartlett. The two at once discovered that they had much in common.

Murdoch had been genuinely appalled by what he had heard and seen at Anzac: the danger and the squalor of the men’s lives, the sickness, the monotonous food, the general air of depression. The Australians he talked to were extremely critical of G.H.Q., and they said that they dreaded the approach of winter. Ashmead-Bardett was able to corroborate all this and add a good deal more. He gave it as his opinion that a major catastrophe was about to occur unless something was done. The authorities and the public at home, he said, were in complete ignorance of what was going on, and under the existing censorship at Imbros there was no way of enlightening them – unless, of course, one broke the rules and sent out an uncensored letter. After some discussion they agreed that this must be done. Murdoch was due to leave for England in a day or two; it was arranged that he would take a letter written by Ashmead-Bartlett and get it into the hands of the authorities in London.

While they were waiting for the next ship for Marseilles, Ashmead-Bartlett wrote his letter, and then coached Murdoch very fully in the mistakes and dangers of the campaign so that Murdoch would be able to furnish information on his own account on his arrival in London. ‘I further,’ Ashmead-Bartlett says in his book The Uncensored Dardanelles, ‘gave Murdoch letters of introduction to others who might be useful in organizing a campaign to save the Army on Gallipoli, and arranged for him to see Harry Lawson[30]30
  The proprietor of Ashmead-Bartlett’s newspaper the Daily Telegraph.


[Закрыть] to urge him to allow me to return. I promised him that if he was held up in his mission, or if the authorities refused to listen to his warnings, I would at once resign and join forces with him in London.’

Early in the second week of September Murdoch set off. When he arrived at Marseilles a few days later he was met on the quay by a British officer with an escort of British troops and French gendarmes. They proceeded to place him under arrest, and it was not until he had handed over Ashmead-Bartlett’s letter that he was released and allowed to go on his way to London.

Long afterwards, when the war was over, Ashmead-Bartlett and Murdoch learned how they were given away: they had been overheard in their discussions at Imbros by another correspondent, (Henry Nevinson) who sent a letter to Hamilton warning him of what was afoot. Hamilton was inclined to be amused at first, and he wrote, ‘I had begun to wonder what had come over Mr. Murdoch and now it seems he has come over me!’ But he acted very quickly. A cable was sent off to the War Office in London asking them to intercept Murdoch on his journey; and on September 28 Ashmead-Bartlett at Imbros was sent for by Braithwaite and told that he must leave the Army.

Hamilton’s informant had been wrong in one respect. The letter had not been addressed to Lawson as he thought, but to Asquith, the Prime Minister. Hamilton was not dismayed when he heard this news from London: ‘I do not for one moment believe Mr. Asquith would employ such agencies and for sure he will turn Murdoch and his wares into the wastepaper basket… Tittletattle will effect no lodgement in the Asquith brain.’

But here again he was wrong, for Murdoch had by no means given up the hunt. He had lost Ashmead-Bartlett’s letter, but he had his own pen. On his arrival in England he wrote an 8,000-word report on Gallipoli, and addressed it to the Australian Prime Minister, Andrew Fisher. Ashmead-Bartlett’s letter, which was now safely pouched in the War Office, had said that Hamilton and his staff were openly referred to by the troops at Gallipoli with derision, and that morale in the Army had collapsed; but this was the mildest pin-pricking compared with the views that Murdoch now disclosed. Part of his report was a eulogy of the Australian soldiers: his criticism was reserved for the English. Braithwaite, he informed the Australian Prime Minister, was ‘more cordially detested in our forces than Enver Pasha’. Birdwood ‘had not the fighting qualities or the big brain of a great general’. Kitchener ‘has a terrible task in getting pure work from the General Staff of the British Army, whose motives can never be pure, for they are unchangeably selfish’. Murdoch had seen one of Hamilton’s staff officers ‘wallowing’ in ice while wounded men were dying of heat a few hundred yards away. As for the British soldiers of the New Army, they were ‘merely a lot of childish youths without strength to endure or brains to improve their conditions’. One would refuse to believe that these could be British soldiers at all, their physique was so much below that of the Turks. ‘From what I saw of the Turk,’ the report went on, ‘I am convinced he is… a better man than those opposed to him.’

On the question of the morale of the soldiers Murdoch was equally trenchant. ‘Sedition,’ he wrote, ‘is talked around every tin of bully beef on the peninsula.’ And again, ‘I shall always remember the stricken face of a young English lieutenant when I told him he must make up his mind for a winter campaign.’ And finally, ‘I do not like to dictate this sentence, even for your eyes, but the fact is that after the first day at Suvla an order had to be issued to officers to shoot without mercy any soldier who lagged behind or loitered in an advance.’

There was perhaps some excuse for this amazing document, despite the fact that Murdoch had been only for a few hours at the front and could hardly have seen very much of the Turks. Overstatement is not such a rare thing in time of war, and any journalist would recognize here the desire to tell a good story, to present the facts in the most brisk and colourful way.

To the inexperienced and confident eye of a young man who had been brought up in a remote dominion, who knew very little about other kinds of people and their ways, and still less about war, this first sight of the battlefield had been a terrible thing; and no doubt Murdoch was genuinely indignant. He felt that it was his duty to break ‘the conspiracy of silence’ on Imbros.

And there was some substance in the report; not in the frantic and reckless details about sedition and the shooting of lagging soldiers, but in the general theme. G.H.Q. was being criticized, things had been mismanaged, and Murdoch was telling the plain truth when he said so. At all events, it was the truth as he saw it, and in wartime there is a definite place for the reports of fresh eyewitnesses of this kind. They serve to remind politicians and headquarters planners that they are dealing with human beings who in the end are much more important than machines and elaborate plans. Such documents can hardly be used as state papers, as evidence upon which policy can be decided, and Murdoch’s letter should have remained what it was – a private letter to his Government which required checking from other sources.

But Lloyd George saw it. It is only fair to assume that Lloyd George was sincerely moved by its terms, but he was also an opponent of Lord Kitchener, and he had always preferred Salonika to Gallipoli. He urged Murdoch to send a copy to Mr. Asquith.

If up to this point an explanation can be made of Murdoch’s motives, it is more difficult to find an excuse for the action which the Prime Minister now took. He did not send the report to Hamilton for his comments. He did not wait until Kitchener had studied it. He had it printed as a state paper on the duck-egg blue stationery of the Committee of Imperial Defence, and circulated it to the members of the Dardanelles Committee. This was the paper they had before them, when on October 11 they decided to send either Haig or Kitchener to Gallipoli to find out what Hamilton and his headquarters were up to. This was the origin of the ‘flow of unofficial reports’ about which Kitchener had warned Hamilton earlier in the week.

On this same day, too, October 11, Ashmead-Bartlett arrived in London fresh from his dismissal from G.H.Q. at Imbros. He lost no time in seeing Lord Northcliffe, the proprietor of The Times and the Daily Mail, and in making arrangements for a full, uncensored exposure of the Gallipoli question in the columns of the Sunday Times. Both Murdoch and Ashmead-Bartlett were very busy in Whitehall and Fleet Street during the next few days, and it soon became known that they had Northcliffe’s backing. Northcliffe by now was convinced that Gallipoli must be evacuated.

On October 14 the Dardanelles Committee assembled again, and Hamilton’s reply to Kitchener’s evacuation cable was put before them. It was, as they feared, an unhelpful and depressing message – merely this despondent reference to losses of fifty per cent. Churchill was still for supporting Gallipoli, but with the failure of the August battles his reputation had taken a further downward plunge – after all, was he not the author of the whole disastrous adventure? – and the Salonika group was very active. They insisted that Hamilton should go. It was left to Kitchener to break the news to him.

At Gallipoli the weather had turned bitterly cold, and October 15 on Imbros was a depressing day. Headquarters was on the point of moving across to winter quarters on the other side of the island. A new stone shack, something like a Greek shepherd’s hut, had been built for Hamilton, and he was sleeping in his tent for the last time. He was already in bed when an officer came to him with a message from Kitchener marked ‘Secret and Personal’, telling him that when the next message arrived he should decipher it himself. Hamilton had a fair idea of what this next message was going to be, but he allowed himself one final gesture. No, he said, he did not want to be woken when the message came in: it was to be brought to him at the usual hour in the morning.

Next day the message was put before him, and he got to work with the cipher book and the device like a bowstring which was used for decoding cables. Word by word he spelled out:

‘The War Council held last night decided that though the Government fully appreciate your work and the gallant manner in which you personally have struggled to make the enterprise a success in face of the terrible difficulties you have had to contend against, they, all the same, wish to make a change in the command which will give them an opportunity of seeing you.’

General Sir Charles Monro, one of the Army commanders on the Western front, was to supersede him, and Monro was to bring out a new chief-of-staff in place of Braithwaite. Birdwood was to be in temporary command until Monro arrived. Perhaps, the message added, Hamilton might like to visit Salonika and Egypt on his way home so that he could make a report on those places.

No, he decided, he would not like to visit either Egypt or Salonika. He would go home at once and tell them that it was still not too late. Let them send Kitchener out to take command with an adequate force – a force that would hardly be missed in France – and they would have Constantinople within one month. He would buttonhole every Minister from Lloyd George to Asquith, grovel at their feet if necessary, and persuade them that Gallipoli was not lost. They could still win.

It was another cold and windy day. Birdwood and the other Corps Commanders came over to the island to say good-bye, and Hamilton was grateful to the French for their lightness of touch. There was a farewell dinner with de Robeck and Keyes in the Triad, and on the following day a last ride across the island for a last word with the staff. In the afternoon with Braithwaite and his A.D.C’s he went aboard the cruiser Chatham which was to take him home. He was very tired. Now that it was all over it was a little too much to remain on deck and watch Imbros fade from view, and he went down to his cabin. Presently, however, when the anchor was weighed, a message was sent to him from de Robeck asking him to come up on to the quarter-deck of the Chatham, and because he had never wanted for courage he felt bound to go. As he came on deck he found the Chatham steering on a corkscrew course between the anchored vessels of the Fleet. And as he passed each ship the sailors stood and cheered him on his way.