Текст книги "Gallipoli"

Автор книги: Alan Moorehead

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The Narrows on this night presented an appearance that was not unlike the scenes that followed the air raids in the second world war. Chanak, a town of 16,000 people, was now very largely deserted and in ruins. Fires had started during the bombardment and although they had died down after nightfall rubble still blocked the streets and the quays. Everywhere around the forts shell craters had broken up the ground, and at the Dardanos, a little further downstream on the Asiatic shore, the hillsides were pitted and scarred like the surface of the moon. Coins and pieces of pottery which had lain in the earth since classical times had been flung up into the air. Only eight of the heavy cannon had been put out of action, but there was much serious damage in the emplacements, and soldiers worked throughout the night rebuilding the parapets, repairing the telephone lines and righting the guns which had jammed and had shifted their position among the falling debris.

The behaviour of the soldiers throughout the long seven hours’ bombardment had been admirable. Those who watched the Turkish gunners at Kilid Bahr on the Gallipoli side of the straits say that they fought with a wild fanaticism, an Imam chanting prayers to them as they ran to their work on the gun emplacements. This was something more than the usual excitement of battle; the men were possessed, apparently, with a religious fervour, a kind of frenzy against the attacking infidel. And so they exposed themselves quite indifferently to the flying shrapnel and the bursting shells.

The Germans at Hamidieh Fort and the other batteries on the opposite bank displayed a different kind of courage. Many of these men were gunners who had been taken off the Goeben and the Breslau, and so they had the precise and technical discipline of the sea. In addition they had improvised with great skill. In the absence of motor transport and horses they had requisitioned teams of buffaloes to drag their mobile howitzers from place to place, so that the British could never find the range. Field guns were sited on the skyline in such a way as to create the maximum of optical illusion. They had too a primitive but effective device by which black puffs of smoke were made to emerge out of pieces of piping each time the guns fired, and this had drawn some scores of British and French shells away from the batteries.

But none of these makeshifts, nor the discipline and the fanaticism of the defenders, could alter the fact that they had so much ammunition and no more. So long as it lasted they were quite confident that they could keep the Fleet at bay – and probably this confidence governed every other feeling at this high point of the attack. But if the battle went on and no unforeseen reinforcements arrived it was obvious to the commanders that the moment would come when they would be bound to order their men to fire off the last round and then retire. After that they could do no more.

They were convinced that the Fleet would attack again on the following day. They knew nothing of the alarming mystery which had been created among the British and the French by the loss of the Bouvet, the Irresistible and the Ocean. This was a matter which the Germans and the Turks could have explained in two minutes. What had happened was that on the night of March 8 a Lieut.-Colonel Geehl, who was a Turkish mine expert, had taken a small steamer called the Nousret down into Eren Keui Bay and there, parallel to the Asiatic shore and just inside the slack water, he had laid a new line of twenty mines. He did this because he had seen British warships manœuvring there during the previous day. Somehow in the ten days before the March 18 attack the British minesweepers had never found these mines; three of them, it is true, had been swept up, but it was not realized that there was a whole line of them; nor had they been noticed by the British aerial reconnaissance. For these ten days the destiny of the Fleet and much else besides had been lying quietly there in the clear water.

To the Turks and the Germans it hardly seemed likely that the enemy warships would make this mistake a second time. And so through this night of March 18 they worked and waited for what the morning would bring, not over-elated by the success of the day or indifferent to their danger, but simply determined to fight on.

The British knew nothing of all this – of the plight of the gunners at the Narrows or of the preparations which the Turkish government was making to abandon Constantinople. A few of the leaders like Keyes at the Dardanelles and Churchill in London might have divined that they had now come up to the crisis of the battle, but they had nothing definite to go on, they simply felt the presence of victory very near at hand. The others felt nothing of the kind. And in fact, through all these weeks while the bombardment had been going on, the old misgivings about the whole adventure had been revived in London. It was not that the commanders wanted to abandon it; they were eager to push on and believed that it could be made to succeed. But it was increasingly felt, at first at the Admiralty and then in the War Office, that the Navy would not be able to do the job alone. Somehow an army would have to be provided.

As early as February, before ever Carden had begun the bombardment, Venizelos, the Greek Prime Minister, had been privately approached over the matter. As an inducement for Greece to come in on the side of the Allies he was offered two divisions, one British and one French, to stiffen his northern flank at Salonika. Venizelos judged that this reinforcement would be just enough to bring his enemies down on top of him and not enough to hold them off, and he therefore declined the offer. At the end of February however he changed his mind. Carden’s bombardment was going very well and it looked as though he might be in the Sea of Marmara at any moment. On March 1 the Greeks offered to send a force of three divisions to occupy the Gallipoli peninsula and then advance, if possible, upon Constantinople.

There is a fatuity about the negotiations which followed that still has power to cause surprise across the gulf of two world wars. It was to everybody’s interest – Russia’s more than anyone’s – that Greece should come in with her army and buttress the Fleet at the critical moment; yet the arrangements that were now made were precisely calculated to keep her out and almost lose her allegiance altogether. Britain and France would have accepted the Greek offer at once. But to Russia it was a matter of great alarm. It revived all her old fears about the guardianship of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, her one vital outlet to the south. She by no means wished to have the Greeks in Constantinople when she might be there herself. Blind to the fact that his own military situation was desperate, and that the revolution and his own death were not far off, the Czar permitted himself to say to the British Ambassador on March 3 that in no circumstances would he see Greek soldiers in Constantinople. In particular, King Constantine was not to appear there.

When this news reached Athens the Venizelos Government fell and was replaced on March 7 by a new ministry of pro-German views. Britain and France meanwhile, with an eye to bolstering Russia’s morale, informed the Czar that he should have control of the Bosphorus as soon as Constantinople fell, and an agreement to that effect was signed in the middle of March. With this all the Navy’s hopes of getting an army quickly into the Gallipoli peninsula were gone. It remained to be seen what could be done by Britain and France.

In London the chief advocate for an army for Gallipoli was Lord Fisher. ‘The Dardanelles,’ he cried in a note to Lloyd George, ‘Futile without soldiers!’ and he remarked very sensibly, ‘Somebody will have to land at Gallipoli some time or other.’ The decision on this matter, however, did not rest with the Admiralty; it rested with Kitchener, and Kitchener had been saying all along that he had no soldiers to spare. In point of fact he did have soldiers who were not then employed – notably the 29th Division, which was a very fine unit of the regular Army standing idle in England. Through February a lively argument developed between the western front generals and the supporters of the Dardanelles scheme as to who should get possession of this valuable force. By the middle of the month Kitchener was coming round to the Dardanelles side, and on the 16th he announced that the division could sail for the Ægean. It would assist the marines already on the spot in mopping up the Gallipoli peninsula, and later in occupying Constantinople. This brought so sharp a protest from the generals in Prance that on February 18, the day before the naval bombardment began, the Field Marshal revoked his decision and said that the Australian and New Zealand divisions then in Egypt should go instead. At this the ships which the Admiralty had assembled for the transport of the 29th Division were dispersed.

But now a new factor came into the scene. General Sir William Birdwood was sent out to the Dardanelles to report on the military position there, and one of his earliest messages to Kitchener on March 5 was disturbing. He did not believe, Birdwood said, that the Fleet would get through by itself; the Army would have to come in.

One sympathizes with Kitchener, for the situation was complicated. At one moment he is offered a Greek army and at the next it is snatched away. On March 2 Garden says he can get through. On March 5 Birdwood says he cannot. Nobody at this stage, not even Carden who is ill or Fisher who dislikes the whole design, suggests that the operations should be abandoned. As Churchill wrote later, ‘Everybody’s blood was up’: the excitement of a naval battle, the sudden vision of spectacular success it had conjured up, the historic ground, the daring of the enterprise – all these things had captivated people’s minds, and Kitchener himself at last fell under the Gallipoli spell. On March 10 he announced that the 29th Division was to go after all, and that he had arranged for the French to send a division as well. This meant that, with the Anzac divisions, there would be an Army Corps of some seventy thousand men in the field.

No one knew yet what this large force was to do or precisely where it was to go, or what allies and enemies it would gather on its way. Despite Birdwood’s report it was still thought that the Navy would break through alone, and still no one suggested that it should suspend its operations until the Army arrived so that the two forces could attack together.

Something of the confusion and the vagueness – the remarkable blending of precipitancy and hesitation – that governed the situation in London at this time can be glimpsed from the circumstances in which General Ian Hamilton, an old comrade of Kitchener’s from the South African war, was appointed to command this new army that had drifted into being. It was on the morning of March 12 that Hamilton was told of his appointment. He himself has described the scene:

‘I was working at the Horse Guards when about 10 a.m. K. sent for me. I wondered. Opening the door I bade him good morning and walked up to his desk where he went on writing like a graven image. After a moment, he looked up and said in a matter-of-fact tone, “We are sending a military force to support the Fleet now at the Dardanelles, and you are to have command… ”

‘K., after his one tremendous remark, had resumed his writing at the desk. At last, he looked up and inquired, “Well?”

‘ “We have done this sort of thing before, Lord K.,” I said; “We have run this sort of show before and you know without saying I am most deeply grateful and you know without saying that I will do my best and that you can trust my loyalty – but I must say something – I must ask you some questions.” Then I began.

‘K. frowned; shrugged his shoulders; I thought he was going to be impatient, but although he gave curt answers at first he slowly broadened out, until at the end no one else could get a word in edgeways.’

Lord Kitchener, however, was not able to be very explicit, for until the Navy had launched its attack on March 18 neither he nor anybody else had any clear notion of what Hamilton was to do. General Caldwell, the Director of Military Operations, was called in and although he was able to produce a map of the Gallipoli area (which subsequently turned out to be quite inaccurate), the sum of his knowledge of the situation appeared to be confined to a plan for a landing on the southern part of the Gallipoli peninsula which had been worked out by the Greek General Staff some months before. The Greeks, Caldwell said, had estimated that they would require 150,000 men.

Kitchener dismissed this idea at once. Half that number, he said, would do Hamilton handsomely. The Turks were so weak on the peninsula that if a British submarine managed to get through the Narrows and wave the Union Jack outside the town of Gallipoli the whole enemy garrison would take to its heels and make a beeline for Bulair.

At this point General Wolfe Murray, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and General Archibald Murray, the Inspector of Home Forces, came into the room together with General Braithwaite, who had been appointed Hamilton’s chief-of-staff. None of them had heard of this plan for a Gallipoli campaign before and the Murrays were so taken aback that neither of them ventured to comment.

However, Braithwaite spoke. According to Hamilton: ‘He only said one thing to K. and that produced an explosion. He said it was vital that we should have a better air service than the Turks in case it came to fighting over a small area like the Gallipoli peninsula; he begged, therefore, that whatever else we got, or did not get, we might be fitted out with a contingent of up-to-date aeroplanes, pilots and observers. K. turned on him with flashing spectacles, and rent him with the words, “Not one”.’[5]5
  It was left to the Navy to supply aircraft for the operation.


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Returning to the War Office next morning Hamilton found Kitchener ‘standing at his desk splashing about with his pen at three different drafts of instructions’. There were but three or four essential points in the document that finally emerged; Hamilton was to hold back his troops until the Fleet had made its full-scale attack on the forts at the Narrows. If this attempt failed he was to land on the Gallipoli peninsula; if it succeeded he was to hold the peninsula with a light garrison and advance directly upon Constantinople, where it was hoped he would be joined by a Russian corps which would be landed on the Bosphorus.

In no circumstances was Hamilton to proceed until his whole force was assembled and he was not to fight on the Asiatic side of the Dardanelles.

‘He toiled over the wording of his instructions,’ Hamilton says in his diary. ‘They were headed “Constantinople Expeditionary Force”. I begged him to alter this to avert Fate’s evil eye. He consented and both this corrected draft and the copy as finally approved are now in Braithwaite’s dispatch box more modestly headed “Mediterranean Expeditionary Force”. None of the drafts helps us with facts about the enemy; the politics; the country, and our allies, the Russians. In sober fact these “instructions” leave me to my own devices in the East.

‘So I said good-bye to old K. as casually as if we were to meet together at dinner. Actually my heart went out to my old chief. He was giving me the best thing in his gift and I hated to leave him among people who were frightened of him. But there was no use saying a word. He did not even wish me luck and I did not expect him to, but he did say, rather unexpectedly, after I had said good-bye and just as I was taking up my cap from the table, “If the Fleet gets through, Constantinople will fall of itself and you will have won, not a battle, but the war”.’

By now there had been assembled some thirteen officers who were to act on Hamilton’s staff. Most of these were regular soldiers, but there were one or two who, Hamilton says, had hastily put on uniform for the first time in their lives: ‘Leggings awry, spurs upside down, belts over shoulder straps! I haven’t a notion of who they all are.’ Others again who were to handle the administration and quartermastering of the headquarters he failed to meet at all, since they had not heard of their appointments as yet.

However, the paramount need now was haste, and at 5 p.m. on Friday, March 13, the party, armed with the instructions, the inaccurate map, a three-years-old handbook on the Turkish Army and a pre-war report on the Dardanelles defences, proceeded to Charing Cross station. Churchill, who had been pressing strongly for their immediate departure, had made all the arrangements; a special train was waiting to take them to Dover where they were to cross to Calais on H.M.S. Foresight. At Calais another special express would take them through the night to Marseilles, where H.M.S. Phaeton, a 30-knot unarmoured cruiser, was commissioned to convey them to the Dardanelles.

Churchill himself with his wife came down to Charing Cross to see the party off, and there was some last minute conversation on the subject of Hamilton’s reports from the front. They would all have to go directly to Kitchener, Hamilton said; to address Churchill separately at the Admiralty would be disloyal. With that he was off. As the train drew out Hamilton said to Captain Aspinall, the young officer who was to plan the operations, ‘This is going to be an unlucky show. I kissed my wife through her veil.’ Four days later the party was at the Dardanelles.

They were just in time. Next day, March 18, Hamilton watched the assault on the Narrows from the decks of the Phaeton.

So now at midnight they were all gathered in the arena: the Turks and the Germans at the Narrows preparing to make a desperate stand, the British and French sailors with their battered but still powerful fleet, and the new Allied Commander-in-Chief who had arrived without an army and without a plan.

Having satisfied himself that both the Ocean and the Irresistible were safe from the Turks at the bottom of the sea, Keyes on the night of March 18 went directly in the Jed to the Queen Elizabeth to see de Robeck. He was astonished to find the Admiral much upset. He was sure, de Robeck said, that because of his losses he would be dismissed from the command on the following day. Keyes answered with some spirit that de Robeck had judged the situation quite wrongly: Churchill would not be discouraged. He would send reinforcements at once and back them up in every way. Apart from the 639 men drowned in the Bouvet, the casualties had been amazingly small: not seventy men in the entire Fleet. All three lost battleships were old vessels due for scrap, and even if the Gaulois and the Inflexible were withdrawn for repairs the great power of the Fleet was substantially intact.

For a time the two officers discussed the problem of the mines, and it was agreed that they should immediately set about organizing a new force to deal with them. The civilian crews of the trawlers would be sent home, and volunteers from the lost battleships would take their place. Destroyers would be equipped with sweeping apparatus, and at the next attempt an attack would be finally driven home.

On this encouraging note the Admiral and his chief-of-staff finally went to their cabins for a few hours’ rest.

Keyes rose next morning, March 19, and having shaved, as was his custom, with a copy of Kipling’s ‘If’ propped up before him, went out to survey the condition of the Fleet, which had spent the night sheltering about Tenedos. It was clear that a day or two must elapse before the attack could be resumed – the wind was again rising to a gale and there was much to be done in organizing the new minesweeping force – but everywhere the captains and the crews were eager to renew the fight.

In the course of the morning a message arrived from the Admiralty condoling with de Robeck over his setback but urging him to press on with the attack.

His losses were to be made good by four more battleships – the Queen, Implacable, London and Prince of Wales—which would sail at once. In addition the French Ministry of Marine was replacing the Bouvet with the Henri IV.

The damage to the French squadron had been severe: Gaulois had been forced to ground herself on Rabbit Island to the north of Tenedos, and the Suffren was leaking from the effects of a plunging shell. The Gaulois, however, was soon pumped out and refloated, and with the Inflexible and the Suffren she went off to Malta for repairs. Meanwhile the organization of the new minesweeping force began. One hundred and fifteen men from the trawler crews were sent home and there was an overwhelming response from the crews of the Ocean and the Irresistible for volunteers to replace them. Kites, wire mesh, and other tackle were ordered from Malta, and at Tenedos Greek fishermen were engaged to help the British crews in equipping the destroyers as minesweepers. All day in heavy seas this work was pressed forward, and on March 20 de Robeck was able to report to the Admiralty that fifty British and twelve French minesweepers, all manned by volunteers, would soon be available. Steel nets would be laid across the straits to deal with floating mines when the attack was renewed. ‘It is hoped,’ he added, ‘to be in a position to commence operations in three or four days.’

Now too an efficient squadron of aircraft under the command of Air Commodore Samson began to arrive. With this the Navy hoped greatly to improve their spotting of the enemy guns.

De Robeck also wrote to Hamilton, who had gone to Lemnos to inspect the 2,000 marines and the 4,000 Australian and New Zealand soldiers who had already arrived there. He urged Hamilton not to take these troops back to Egypt for re-grouping as he proposed to do, since it might create a bad impression in the Balkans just at the moment when the Navy was about to resume its attack. ‘We are all getting ready for another go,’ he said, ‘and not in the least beaten or down-hearted.’

Hamilton did not share this confidence. He had been deeply moved by what he had seen of the battle on March 18, and perhaps he was affected by the sight of the damaged Inflexible creeping back to Tenedos. Perhaps he was influenced by Birdwood, who from the beginning had never believed that the Fleet could do the job alone. Other considerations – even a simple chivalrous desire to help the Navy – may have weighed with him; but at all events he sent the following message to Kitchener on March 19:

‘I am most reluctantly driven to the conclusion that the straits are not likely to be forced by battleships, as at one time seemed probable, and that, if my troops are to take part, it will not take the subsidiary form anticipated. The Army’s part will be more than mere landing parties to destroy forts; it must be a deliberate and prepared military operation, carried out at full strength, so as to open a passage for the Navy.’

Kitchener had replied with surprising energy: ‘You know my view, that the Dardanelles must be forced, and that if large military operations on the Gallipoli peninsula by your troops are necessary to clear the way, those operations must be undertaken, after careful consideration of the local defences, and must be carried through.’

This then was the situation on March 21—a Naval Command that believes that the Fleet can still get through alone, and an Army Command convinced that it cannot.

The following morning, March 22, de Robeck decided to take the Queen Elizabeth over to Lemnos for a conference with Hamilton. There is something of a mystery about this meeting, for none of the subsequent accounts of what took place are in agreement with each other. Keyes was occupied with the arrangements for the new naval attack and was not present, but he assures us that he believed that nothing more than future military movements were to be discussed. Those who assembled in the Queen Elizabeth were Hamilton, Birdwood and Braithwaite from the Army, and De Robeck and Wemyss from the Navy.

Hamilton’s version is as follows: ‘The moment he sat down de Robeck told us that he was now quite clear he could not get through without the help of all my troops. Before ever we went on board, Braithwaite, Birdwood and I agreed that, whatever we landsmen might think, we must leave the seamen to settle their own job, saying nothing for or against the land operations or amphibious operations until the sailors themselves turned to us and said that they had abandoned the idea of forcing the straits by naval operations alone. They have done so. The fat (that is us) is fairly in the fire.

‘No doubt we had our views. Birdie (Birdwood) and my own staff disliked the idea of chancing mines with million pound ships. The hesitants who always make hay in foul weather had been extra active since the sinking of the three men-of-war. Suppose the Fleet could get through with the loss of another battleship or two – how the devil would our troopships be able to follow? And the store ships? And the colliers?

‘This had made me turn contrary. During the battle I had cabled that the chances of the Navy pushing through on their own were hardly fair fighting chances, but since then de Robeck, the man who should know, had twice said that he did think that there was a fair fighting chance. Had he stuck to that opinion at the conference, then I was ready, as a soldier, to make light of military croaks about troopships. Constantinople must surrender, revolute or scuttle within a very few hours of our battleships entering the Marmara. Memories of one or two obsolete six-inchers at Ladysmith helped me to feel as Constantinople would feel when her rail and sea communications were cut and a rain of shell fell upon the penned-in populace from de Robeck’s terrific batteries. Given a good wind that nest of iniquity would go up like Sodom and Gomorrah in a winding sheet of flame.

‘But once the Admiral said his battleships could not fight through without help, there was no foothold left for the views of a landsman.

‘So there was no discussion. We at once turned our faces to the land scheme.’

This account does not square with what Keyes knew of de Robeck’s views up to the time of this meeting; and it does not square with a message the Admiral sent to London after the meeting was over.

‘I do not hold the check on 18th decisive,’ he wrote, ‘but, having met General Hamilton on 22nd and heard his proposals, I now consider a combined operation essential to obtain great results and object of campaign… To attack Narrows now with Fleet would be a mistake, as it would jeopardize the execution of a better and bigger scheme.’

In other words, it is only after he has heard Hamilton’s proposals that he decides to abandon the naval attack.

Whatever may be the truth of this matter – whether Hamilton enticed de Robeck away from the naval attack or whether de Robeck himself suggested that the Army should come in and help – the important thing is that on March 22 the Admiral changed his mind; nothing more was now to be done by the Fleet until the Army, now scattered along the Mediterranean, was assembled and ready to land.

One can perhaps glimpse something of what was going on in de Robeck’s mind. The wounds of March 18 were beginning to stiffen and hurt. To sailors of de Robeck’s generation it was an appalling thing to lose battleships, no matter how old and out of date they were. Most of their lives had been spent on these decks; these ships had been their home, and through the years they had developed for them not only affection but pride as well. The whole tradition of the Navy was that the ship was more important than the man: no matter what the cost in lives the captain must always try to save his ship. And now in a few hours three of the largest vessels of the Fleet with their famous names had gone to the bottom.

Then again de Robeck was perfectly aware of Fisher’s opposition to the Dardanelles adventure. For the moment Churchill might be holding the old Admiral in line, but young and enthusiastic First Lords did not last for ever. Fisher stood for the Navy, its permanence and its traditions, and he was a formidable man. He had said all along that the Fleet was not likely to get through without the aid of the Army, and now here were three sunken battleships to prove his point. Suppose another three ships were lost when the attack was renewed? It could very easily happen. What was Fisher going to say to that?

There was one other point. De Robeck had very much Hoped that once he was in the Marmara Hamilton would land at Bulair on the neck of the peninsula, and that the Turkish Army, finding itself cut off, would surrender. Thus there would no longer be any threat to the lifeline of the Fleet through the Dardanelles. But at the meeting Hamilton had announced that it could not be done. He had been up to Bulair himself aboard the Phaeton, and had seen the network of entrenchments there. Hamilton now proposed that he should land instead at the tip of the peninsula and fight his way up it. This altered the Fleet’s situation entirely. It meant that there would be no sudden collapse of the Turks; they would continue to hold the Narrows and threaten the supply ships coming through. It was true that from the Marmara the Fleet could attack the Turkish forts from the rear. But how long would it take to destroy them? How long could the Fleet remain isolated in the Marmara without coal and ammunition; and with the Goeben still intact? A fortnight? Three weeks?

There were of course grave dangers in delaying the renewal of the naval attack until the Army was ready. With every day that went by the Turks were recovering from the bombardment of the 18th, and one had only to look at the new entrenchments that appeared every morning on the cliffs to know that reinforcements were arriving. Well then, how much delay would there be? Hamilton thought it would be about three weeks before he was ready. Had Kitchener allowed the 29th Division to sail at the beginning of February as he had originally intended, the troops would be here now, and it would have been a very different story. But the 29th was still at sea, far down the other end of the Mediterranean,[6]6
  Actually the first transports had just reached Malta, where that day the officers were being entertained at a special performance of the opera Faust.


[Закрыть] and Hamilton did not believe he could attack without them – and in fact Kitchener had expressly forbidden him to do so.