Текст книги "Gallipoli"

Автор книги: Alan Moorehead

Liman’s headquarters staff in Gallipoli town was Turkish, but he had, scattered through his divisions, a number of German officers in senior commands; and the German gunners and other technicians remained at the Narrows under a German admiral.

Having placed his forces where he wanted them – and these dispositions have been applauded by almost all experts who have studied them – Liman next got his men into training. They had grown stiff, he says, in their garrisons, and he now instituted a programme of drilling and digging. By day the men marched. By night they came down to the coast and worked on new roads and entrenchments. There was a shortage of every kind of material, and much improvisation was required. Spades and other implements were taken from the peasants, and the soldiers even dug the earth with their bayonets. When the supply of barbed wire gave out they ripped up the fences of the farms; and on the most likely landing places this wire was spread beneath the surface of the water. Land mines were constructed out of torpedo heads.

This work was pressed on with great haste, for there were many signs that the Allied attack would not be much longer delayed. Before the end of March Liman learned that four British officers had arrived in Piræus in Greece, and had there bought for cash forty-two large lighters and five tugs. The British apparently were not very successful in keeping watch on spies in Lemnos and the other Greek islands, for a stream of information about the Allies’ preparations kept reaching Constantinople by way of Egypt and Greece. General Hamilton’s arrival had been reported. It was known that a landing pier had been built in the harbour of Mudros, on Lemnos, and that stores and equipment were being unloaded there. Most of these reports came from the Balkans, but even as far off as Rome German agents were hearing rumours of the coming offensive, and these were duly relayed to the headquarters in Gallipoli. At one time it was said that 50,000 British soldiers had assembled on Imbros and Lemnos. Then the total was increased to 80,000 with 50,000 French in addition. Though confusing, all this intelligence pointed in the same direction: there was not much time left.

Each day, too, there was a good deal of enemy activity which Liman could see with his own eyes. Allied aircraft of a newer, faster pattern had begun to fly over the peninsula on reconnaissance. Like cruising sharks, grey, silent and sinister, the silhouettes of British warships kept ceaselessly moving back and forth far out to sea.

Then in the third week of April there occurred a sudden flurry of activity in the straits themselves.

Shortly after dawn on April 17 Turkish sentries at Kephez Point saw a submarine come to the surface. Apparently it was heading for the Narrows with the intention of passing through to the Sea of Marmara, but suddenly it was caught in a violent eddy and began to drift towards the shore. At once every Turkish gun in the neighbourhood was turned on to the helpless vessel, and as it touched the shore the crew came on deck and were swept into the sea by machine-gun fire. During the next two days and nights an erratic duel took place between the Turks and the British for the abandoned hulk. In turn British submarines, aircraft and warships came rushing into the straits in an attempt to destroy it before the Turks got possession, but their torpedoes went astray, the bombs fell wide, and the warships were driven off by the shore batteries. Finally on the third night a little British patrol boat came sailing straight into the glare of the searchlights and with a lucky shot got one of its torpedoes home.

According to Lewis Einstein, the American Minister in Constantinople, the Turks behaved very well over this incident. When the submarine was first abandoned and the British sailors were struggling in the water the Turkish soldiers on the shore jumped in and rescued them. The dead were first buried on the beach and then taken to the English cemetery at Chanak, where a service was said over them. ‘The Turks are extraordinary in this,’ Einstein wrote. ‘One moment they will murder wantonly, and the next surprise everyone by their kindness. Thus when the first English submarine prisoners were led into the hospital at Chanak, shivering in their wet clothes, the Turkish wounded called them guests, and insisted on their being given everything new, and such few delicacies as they possessed.’

It was only later when the prisoners were sent to filthy prisons in Constantinople that ill-treatment began, but even then in most cases it was the ill-treatment of indifference, of the squalor and callousness of the East rather than an act of deliberate revenge.

Meanwhile another warning had sounded on the Dardanelles. On April 19 a company of Turkish soldiers had made their camp in a fold of the hills on the western side of the peninsula. It was the usual early morning scene: the soldiers asleep on the ground, the smoke of the first cooking fires rising upwards and the lines of horses and mules tethered nearby. Then without warning the terrible searing rush of shells filled the sky and everything was in an uproar of cascading earth and bursting shrapnel. Some thought it was an earthquake and lay still in terror, others ran to the lines of screaming animals and tried to mount and get away, others again who kept their wits went to their guns. But they could see nothing on the flat and deserted sea, nothing but a tiny yellow balloon on the far horizon. It was not until after the campaign that the Turks learned that this was the Manica, the first of the British kite-balloon ships, trying out a new artillery spotting device. While the vessel still lay below the horizon out of sight from the land two observers had gone up in a wicker basket attached to the balloon at the end of a long vertiginous swaying cable, and, with the first light of the morning, had seen through their binoculars the peaceful encampment in the hills. It was an easy matter then for the encampment’s position to be fixed on the map and the news to be telephoned down to the Manica’s bridge below; and it was the shells of the cruiser Bacchante lying unseen still further out at sea that fell, so miraculously, out of the empty sky on to the sleeping Turks.

And then, a day or two later, a heavy British air-raid, the first of the campaign, fell on Maidos at the Narrows. Seven 100-lb. bombs, an unheard-of kind of missile in the Mediterranean at this time, set the town on fire.

After this there was silence again. No more ships attempted to enter the straits and no gun was fired on either side. The weather continued to be unsettled and cold. Among the Turks, who had now been given almost five weeks in which to prepare their defences, nothing remained to be done but to wait – to post their watchers on the hill tops and the cliffs, to keep gazing out to sea by day and sweeping the straits with their searchlights at night. The dread of the coming invasion was everywhere about them; but where it would fall, and at what hour of the day or night, and what it would look like when it came – of all this they had no notion at all.

CHAPTER SIX

‘A voice had become audible, a note had been struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth in arms engaged in this present war, than any other… The voice has been swiftly stilled.’

Winston Churchill in a letter to The Times, April 26, 1915.

THERE was a fever of excitement about the ‘Constantinople Expedition’ among young men in England. ‘It’s too wonderful for belief,’ Rupert Brooke wrote as he was setting out. ‘I had not imagined Fate could be so kind… Will Hero’s Tower crumble under the 15-inch guns? Will the sea be polyphloisbic and wine-dark and unvintageable? Shall I loot mosaics from St. Sophia, and Turkish Delight and carpets? Should we be a Turning Point in History? Oh God! I’ve never been quite so happy in my life I think. Never quite so pervasively happy; like a stream flowing entirely to one end. I suddenly realize that the ambition of my life has been – since I was two – to go on a military expedition against Constantinople.’

Rupert Brooke, with his romanticism, his eagerness and his extreme physical beauty, is the symbolic figure in the Gallipoli campaign. One feels that he was destined to be there, that among all these tens of thousands of young men this was the one who was perfectly fitted to express their exuberance, their secret devotion, their ‘half joy of life and half readiness to die’.[8]8
  A phrase of Desmond McCarthy’s in a preface to Ben Kendim by Aubrey Herbert.


[Закрыть]

He was just twenty-seven at this time, and the circumstances of his life were almost too good to be true. There had been his lyrical schooldays at Rugby, where he was liked by everybody and where he was in all the teams, and all the literary honours were his. Then Cambridge with the dabblings in socialism, the amateur theatricals, the sittings-up all night, the ramblings through the countryside talking of Oscar Wilde and singing all the way. Like T. E. Lawrence later on he had met and captivated almost everyone who counted in London, from the Asquiths and the Churchills to the Shaws and Henry James. He had travelled everywhere (though always at the end of a thread that tied him to England), and just before the war had been searching for lost Gauguins in Tahiti in the South Pacific. It was Churchill who had obtained for him his commission in the Royal Naval Division which had gone first to Antwerp and was now committed to Gallipoli. More than ever, on the eve of this new adventure, the poet was the hero of Mrs. Cornford’s poem:

 
A young Apollo, golden-haired,
Stands dreaming on the verge of strife,
Magnificently unprepared
For the long littleness of life.
 

Brooke’s own war sonnets were soon to be on everybody’s lips:

 
Now, God be thanked who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping…
 
 
Blow out you bugles, over the rich Dead!
If I should die think only this of me;
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.
 

All this – the charmed life, the beauty, the immense promise of his talents – was now to be risked in battle in the classical Ægean. It was indeed almost too wonderful for belief.

As always, Brooke was surrounded by his friends. There was young Arthur Asquith, the Prime Minister’s son; Aubrey Herbert, the orientalist who ‘went to the East by accident as a young man may go to a party, and find his fate there’; others like Charles Lister and Denis Browne who would certainly have been something in the world had they not been about to die. To these, new friends were constantly being added; men like Bernard Freyberg, who was in California when war broke out and came back to England to enlist. He joined the Naval Division.

Soon they were all together in Egypt, living in tents, driving out to the desert to see the pyramids by moonlight, a dedicated group ringed about with its own code and its excitement in the adventure that lay ahead; and they were completely happy. Then Rupert Brooke went down with sunstroke, and the Commander-in-Chief (whom of course he had known in England) called on him in his tent. When Hamilton offered him a place on the headquarters staff Brooke refused; he wanted to be at the landing on Gallipoli with his men.

‘He looked extraordinarily handsome,’ Hamilton wrote in his diary, ‘quite a knightly presence stretched out there on the sand with the only world that counts at his feet.’

Compton Mackenzie in his Gallipoli Memories relates how he too was caught up in the Gallipoli fever. He was living at Capri at the time, had just published Sinister Street (which had made his name), and was working on the concluding chapters of Guy and Pauline. Directly he heard of the expedition he was in a frenzy of impatience to get to Egypt. Friends in Whitehall found him a job on Hamilton’s staff, and presently he was off down the Mediterranean on the first available boat out of Naples, appalled that as yet he had no uniform, and beset with anxiety that he would not arrive in time.

Almost all these young men – and thousands of others less imaginative but just as ardent – were facing the prospect of battle for the first time, and their letters and diaries reveal how strongly the sense of adventure communicated itself through the Army. For the moment the constricting fear of the unknown was overlaid by the newness and the excitement of the occasion, the feeling that they were isolated together here in this remote place and entirely dependent upon one another. They were determined to be brave. They were convinced that they were committed to something which was larger and grander than life itself, perhaps even a kind of purification, a release from the pettiness of things.

‘Once in a generation,’ Hamilton wrote in his diary, ‘a mysterious wish for war passes through the people. Their instinct tells them that there is no other way of progress and of escape from habits that no longer fit them. Whole generations of statesmen will fumble over reforms for a lifetime which are put into full-blooded execution within a week of a declaration of war. There is no other way. Only by intense sufferings can the nations grow, just as a snake once a year must with anguish slough off the once beautiful coat which has now become a strait jacket.’

In the long tradition of British poet-generals Hamilton remains an exception of an extremely elusive kind. One knows everything and nothing about him. Whether one is dealing with the poet or the general at any given point it is almost impossible to tell. Somewhere about this time – April 1915—there was a remarkable photograph taken of the General on board the Triad, and this perhaps reveals him more intimately than all the diaries and the opinions of his friends. One recognizes the other figures in the group at once. Admiral de Robeck stands with his feet firmly planted on the deck, his arms clasped behind his back, and his steady, carved, admiral’s face belongs to gales at sea. Keyes at his side, is exactly as he ought to be: a slim, angular figure, alas not a beautiful face with those big ears, but most engaging. Braithwaite, the Chief of Staff, is the handsome professional; he fills his uniform like a soldier and he knows where he is. But it is upon Hamilton that one inevitably fixes one’s eye. Everything about him is wrong. He has adopted an almost mincing attitude, his shoulders half-turned in embarrassment towards the camera, one hand resting on a stanchion in a curiously feminine way and the other grasping what appears to be a scarf or a piece of material at his side. The fingers are long, shapely and intensely sensitive, the face quite firm and patrician but somehow nervous and ill-at-ease. His uniform does not fit him – or rather he gives the impression that he ought not to be in uniform at all. His cap is a disaster. Braithwaite has the right kind of cap and it suits him; Hamilton’s perches like a pancake on his head, his tunic is bus-conductorish, his breeches too tight for his wilting bow legs. Physically he is the last possible man one can imagine as a commander-in-chief. He simply does not inspire confidence.

And yet it is clear beyond any doubt from this photograph that here is an exceptionally intelligent man – much more intelligent than any of the others. One looks again and finds oneself hoping that this intelligence, this sensitivity and bird-like quickness, also contains a germ of resolution, perhaps some special sort of refined courage which we had missed before; and still one remains uncertain.

It is left to his record to reassure us. The General was sixty-two when this picture was taken. He was born in the Mediterranean on the island of Corfu, and had spent the whole of his adult life in the Army – indeed, he had seen more active service than almost any other senior general. He had fought the tribesmen on the north-west frontier of India, had served throughout the Boer War, and had been with the Japanese in Manchuria in the Russo-Japanese war. In recent years he had held the appointments of commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean and Inspector-General of Overseas Forces. According to his contemporaries, Hamilton was one of those unusual men who apparently are quite indifferent to danger. His left hand had been shattered early in his career, and more than once he had been recommended for the Victoria Cross.

There was one other thing that set him apart, and that was his exceptional talent as a writer. He read and wrote much poetry and he loved to keep diaries in a kind of French shorthand which he had invented himself; these jottings, he said, cleared his mind and put events into perspective when he was in command in the field. As a staff officer he had been full of ideas. His Staff Officer’s Scrapbook, for example, had foretold the disappearance of cavalry in favour of trench warfare.

There is a theme running through this life, and that is Lord Kitchener. Kitchener was Hamilton’s star. Fifteen years before Hamilton had served as the Field Marshal’s chief-of-staff in South Africa, and the intimacy that had grown up between them was a good deal more than the relationship of the admiring junior to his chief; there was a strength in Kitchener, a massiveness, which appears to have deeply satisfied something which was wanting in Hamilton’s own life. He was quite shrewd enough to see Kitchener’s weaknesses, and in his diaries he occasionally permitted himself to fret about them as a woman will fret about her husband. But Kitchener had only to speak out and Hamilton dissolved at once. Old K. In the end he was bigger than them all. One had to protect him from the fools and the critics. Never for an instant does Hamilton challenge his chief’s authority. Never does he fail to pause before taking a major decision and ask himself, ‘What would K. have done?’ And Kitchener on his side promotes his follower, occasionally favours him with his confidence, and now sends him off to Constantinople.

Henry Nevinson, the war correspondent, has an interesting note on Hamilton’s character: ‘From a mingled Highland and Scottish descent he had inherited the so-called Celtic qualities which are regarded by thorough Englishmen with varying admiration and dislike. His blood gave him so conspicuous a physical courage that after the battles of Caesar’s Camp and Diamond Hill the present writer, who knew him there, regarded him as an example of the rare type which not merely conceals fear with success, but does not feel it. Undoubtedly he was deeply tinged with the “Celtic charm”—that glamour of mind and courtesy of behaviour which create suspicion among people endowed with neither.’

After the war Hamilton was criticized for being so much under Kitchener’s thumb, for being a weak commander, a commentator on battles instead of a man of action. But it is only fair to remember that he was respected and liked by Winston Churchill and a great many other demanding people in London. At Gallipoli none of his senior contemporaries speak against him – not Keyes nor any of the Admirals, not any of the French. The one man who attacks him is a corps commander whom Hamilton dismissed. Under Hamilton’s command there is never any dispute between the Army and the Navy, and all the Allied contingents serve with him the utmost loyalty.

This in itself was something of an achievement, for the force that was now assembling itself in Egypt was a very mixed bag indeed. There were the French, a splendid sight on the parade ground, their officers in black and gold, the men in blue breeches and red coats. There were Zouaves and Foreign Legionaries from Africa, Sikhs and Gurkhas from India, and the labour battalions of Levantine Jews and Greeks. There were the sailors of the British and French Navies. There were the Scottish, English and Irish troops. And finally there were the New Zealanders and the Australians.

These last were an unknown quantity. They were all volunteers, they were paid more money than any of the other soldiers, and they exhibited a spirit which was quite unlike anything which had been seen on a European battlefield before. A strange change had overtaken this transplanted British blood. Barely a hundred years before their ancestors had gone out to the other side of the world from the depressed areas of the United Kingdom, many of them dark, small, hungry men. Their sons who had now returned to fight in their country’s first foreign war had grown six inches in height, their faces were thin and leathery, their limbs immensely lithe and strong. Their voices too had developed a harsh cockney accent of their own, and their command of the more elementary oaths and blasphemies, even judged by the most liberal army standards, was appalling. Such military forms as the salute did not come very easily to these men, especially in the presence of British officers, whom they regarded as effete, and their own officers at times appeared to have very little control over them. Each evening in thousands the Australians and New Zealanders came riding into Cairo from their camp near the pyramids for a few hours’ spree in the less respectable streets, riding on the tops of trams, urging their hired cabs and donkeys along the road – and the city shuddered a little.

This independent spirit was a promising thing in its own way, but for Birdwood, the British officer who was put in command of the Anzac[9]9
  ANZAC: Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. The word bears an unfortunate resemblance to the Turkish ‘ANSAC’ which means ‘almost’.


[Закрыть] corps, there was a problem here which could not be easily solved. The men were nearly all civilians, and who could say how they would behave when they came under enemy fire for the first time? A period of intensive training began, but there was not much time.

Indeed, there was very little time for any of the matters which Hamilton had to attend to if he was to honour his undertaking that the attack would be launched by the middle of April. He did not reach Alexandria until the afternoon of March 26, and this meant he had barely three weeks in hand. The job that lay before the General was, in effect, nothing less than the setting up of the largest amphibious operation in the whole history of warfare. No similar exploit in the past bore any real comparison: in 1588 the Spanish Armada never did succeed in landing its men on England; neither Napoleon in Egypt in 1799 nor the British and the French in the Crimea in 1854 had had to face such entrenched positions as Liman von Sanders was now establishing at Gallipoli. In fact the only operation that could be compared with this lay thirty years ahead on the beaches of Normandy in the second world war; and the planning of the Normandy landing was to take not three weeks but nearly two years.

Hamilton’s mind went back to classical times. ‘The landing of an army upon the theatre of operations I have described,’ he wrote in one of his despatches, ‘—a theatre strongly garrisoned throughout and prepared for any such attempt – involved difficulties for which no precedent was forthcoming in military history, except possibly in the sinister legends of Xerxes.’

There were some 75,000 men at the General’s disposal: 30,000 Australians and New Zealanders divided into two divisions, the 29th British Division of 17,000 men, one French division of 16,000, and the Royal Naval Division of 10,000. All these forces, together with 1,600 horses, donkeys and mules and 300 vehicles, had to be so assembled on board the ships that they would be able to land together on the enemy coast under the direct fire of the Turkish guns.

It is a matter of some surprise that the expedition ever got to sea at all. On March 26 Hamilton’s administrative staff had still not arrived from England (it did not get to Alexandria until April 11), many of the soldiers were still at sea, no accurate maps existed, there was no reliable information about the enemy, no plan had been made, and no one had yet decided where the Army was to be put ashore.

The simplest of questions were unanswered. Was there water on the shore or not? What roads existed? What casualties were to be expected and how were the wounded men to be got off to the hospital ships? Were they to fight in trenches or in the open, and what sort of weapons were required? What was the depth of water off the beaches and what sort of boats were needed to get the men, the guns and the stores ashore? Would the Turks resist or would they break as they had done at Sarikamish; and if so how were the Allies to pursue them without transport or supplies?

It was perhaps the very confusion of this situation which made it possible for the staff to get things done. Since no one could really calculate what the difficulties were going to be it was simply a matter of taking the material that came to hand, and of hoping for the best. A period of hectic improvisation began. Men were sent into the bazaars of Alexandria and Cairo to buy skins, oildrums, kerosene tins – anything that would hold water. Others bought tugs and lighters on the docks; others again rounded up donkeys and their native drivers and put them into the Army. There were no periscopes (for trench fighting), no hand grenades and trench-mortars; ordinance workshops set to work to design and make them. In the absence of maps staff officers scoured the shops for guide-books.

On the Alexandria docks lamps were set up so that the work of unloading and repacking the ships could go on all night, and soon the harbour was filled with vessels of every kind from Thames tugboats to requisitioned liners. There was a shortage of almost everything – of guns, of ammunition, of aircraft and of men – and Hamilton sent off a series of messages to Kitchener asking for reinforcements. He had found a brigade of Gurkhas in the Egyptian garrison – could he have those? Where were his reserves of artillery and shells? These requests were met either with terse refusals or no reply at all. Hamilton felt that he was hardly in a position to press the point; Kitchener had been known to be ruthless with subordinates who nagged him, and once he had even taken troops away from an officer who had asked for reinforcements. Then too Hamilton remembered that he had promised Kitchener before he left that he would not embarrass him with requests of this kind. Churchill of course would have helped, but the General had deliberately cut himself off from the First Lord. De Robeck also was chary about asking for too much since his messages were bound to go directly to Fisher in the Admiralty.

‘Even more than in the Fleet,’ Hamilton wrote, ‘I find in the Air Service the profound conviction that, if they could only get into direct touch with Winston Churchill, all would be well. Their faith in the First Lord is, in every sense, touching. But they can’t get the contact and they are thoroughly imbued with the idea that the Sea Lords are at the best half-hearted; at the worst, actively antagonistic to us and the whole of our enterprise.’

Hamilton’s own divisional commanders were very far from being enthusiastic. Before drawing up his plans for the invasion the General asked them for their views, and he received a most discouraging series of replies. Hunter-Weston, the commander of the 29th Division, thought that the difficulties were so great that the expedition ought to be abandoned altogether. Paris, the commander of the Naval Division, wrote, ‘To land would be difficult enough if surprise were possible but hazardous in the extreme under present conditions.’ Birdwood changed his ground; he no longer wanted to go ashore at the tip of the peninsula but at Bulair or somewhere in the neighbourhood of Troy. The French too were all for Asia. Even the Egyptian sultan at a ceremonial luncheon at the Abdin Palace in Cairo offered his opinion. The Turkish forts at the Dardanelles, he assured Hamilton, were absolutely impregnable.

There were other worries which were no less serious. The security position was almost entirely out of hand. Greek trading caiques were noting every preparation in the islands and carrying the news back to enemy agents in Athens. Letters were arriving in Alexandria by the ordinary post from England marked, ‘Constantinople Force, Egypt’. And the Egyptian Gazette in Cairo not only announced the arrival of each new contingent but openly discussed the chances of the expedition at the Dardanelles. Hamilton protested in vain; he was told that since Egypt was a neutral country the British authorities could not interfere with the newspapers. The best therefore that could be hoped was that the Turks would regard all this publicity as an elaborate bluff, and Intelligence was instructed to spread a rumour through the Near East that the actual landing would be made at Smyrna.

All this was very depressing. But Kitchener had said that the attempt must be made, and so there could be no question of turning back. In the first week of April, therefore, Hamilton and his staff set about drawing up their plans at their headquarters in the Metropole Hotel in Alexandria. Even if they had faltered – and Hamilton seems to have been at his best during these days, patient, optimistic and extremely energetic – there now began to grow up around him an atmosphere that made it all the more imperative for him to go on. The expedition began to develop a life of its own. However gloomy the commanders might be, a communal will for action had spread itself through the Army. The men were eager to be off, and it was becoming perfectly clear that they would go into the first assault with great determination. The very sight of the ships gathering in Alexandria harbour, the hammerings in the workshops, the long lines of marching men in the desert, the heavy booming of the artillery at practice – all these things seemed to make it inevitable that they must go forward, and that once they attacked they were bound to win. This auto-suggestion, this mass-will towards adventure, presently began to take effect upon the generals. As the date of the assault grew nearer their earlier misgivings were swallowed up in the practical and stimulating work of getting the Army ready to fight. D’Amade, the French commander, drops his ideas on Asia. Birdwood is now sure that he can get his Australians and New Zealanders ashore. Paris sees chances he overlooked before. And Hunter-Weston, having studied the maps and the forces, declares that his earlier appreciation was wrong – the thing is very possible and he particularly likes the role that he himself is to play.