Текст книги "Gallipoli"

Автор книги: Alan Moorehead

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By April 8 Hamilton judged that the arrangements were moving forward at a sufficient pace to enable him to get away and place his plan before de Robeck and the Admirals. The Arcadian, a liner which normally made pleasure cruises to the Norwegian fjords, had been fitted up as a headquarters ship, and in her he sailed for Lemnos. He arrived in Mudros Harbour on April 10, and at once proceeded to his vital conference with the admirals aboard the Queen Elizabeth.

Hamilton’s plan, though complicated in its details, amounted to a simple assault upon the Gallipoli peninsula itself. The main striking force was to be his best division, the British 29th, under Hunter-Weston. It was to go ashore on five small beaches at Cape Helles at the extreme tip of the peninsula, and it was hoped that by the end of the first day the crest of Achi Baba, six miles inland, would be in its hands. Meanwhile Birdwood was to land with the Anzac Force about thirteen miles up the coast between Gaba Tepe and Fisherman’s Hut. Striking across the peninsula through the Sari Bair hills he was to make for Mal Tepe – the mountain on which Xerxes is supposed to have sat while he reviewed his fleet in the Hellespont. Thus the Turks fighting Hunter-Weston at Cape Helles would be cut off in their rear, and the hills dominating the Narrows would be overcome.

Simultaneously, two main diversions were to be carried out. The Royal Naval Division was to make a pretence at landing at the neck at Bulair, and the French were to go ashore for a large armed raid on Kum Kale on the Asiatic side of the Straits. Later these two forces would be brought back to Cape Helles and put into the main attack. By the second or the third day it was hoped that the lower half of the peninsula would be so overrun that the Fleet with its minesweepers could safely pass through the Narrows into the Sea of Marmara.

De Robeck, Wemyss and Keyes were delighted with this plan. They agreed with Hamilton that he was right in rejecting Bulair. It was much too dangerous, despite all its attractions. Directly the Army advanced inland it would lose the support of the naval guns and expose itself to attack on both its flanks – one Turkish army coming down from Thrace and another coming up from Gallipoli. There was also the possibility that Bulgaria might declare war and threaten Hamilton in his rear. The same kind of difficulties would apply if the Allies made their main assault in Asia.

On the peninsula itself no beach was large enough to allow the Army to concentrate for one hammer blow, but the Fleet would be there to cover the assault at every point, and in any case there was a certain virtue in dispersal: Liman von Sanders would get reports of landings from half a dozen different places at once, and for the first twenty-four hours at least he would not know which was the main one. Therefore he would hold back his reserves until the Allies were securely ashore.

There was to be one important refinement of the plan, and this was a stratagem put forward by a Commander Unwin, who seems to have been inspired by the story of the wooden horse at the siege of Troy. He proposed to secrete 2,000 men in an innocent looking collier, the River Clyde, and run her aground at Cape Helles. Directly she touched, a steam hopper and two lighters were to be brought round to her bows and lashed together to form a bridge to the shore. The men would then issue from two sallyports which were to be cut in the ship’s sides. Running along two gangplanks to a platform at the ship’s bows, they would drop on to the bridge and make their way to the beach. It was hoped in this way to empty the ship within a few minutes. In addition, machine guns were to be mounted behind sandbags in the bows, and these were to hold the enemy down while the disembarkation was taking place.

The Navy indeed had been extremely busy with a number of such devices and improvisations. Quite apart from Keyes’ new fleet of destroyer-minesweepers which was now ready, three dummy battleships had arrived. These were ordinary merchantmen enlarged and disguised with wooden guns and superstructure. From a distance the silhouette they presented was exactly that of a battleship, and it was hoped that their presence here in the Ægean might induce the German Fleet to come out and fight in the North Sea.[10]10
  One of them was subsequently torpedoed by a U-boat near Malta, and must have occasioned some surprise to the Germans. As the ship settled her wooden turrets and her 12-inch guns floated away on the tide.


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Air Commodore Samson was now established on Tenedos, and the seaplane carrier Ark Royal had joined the Fleet. Samson’s difficulties had been almost crippling. When his thirty aircraft were uncrated only five were found to be serviceable, and their equipment was not such as to inspire confidence. Bombs were either released from a primitive rack under the pilot’s feet or simply flung overboard by the observer once the safety tabs had been removed. No machine-guns had been fitted at this stage, but instead, there was available a supply of iron spikes; these the pilot or the observer could aim at such of the enemy who appeared below, rather in the manner of a hunter spearing a bear. Although these spikes emitted an unpleasant whirring noise as they descended, and no doubt created a feeling of extreme insecurity among the infantry below, they seldom hit anything. For the rest, Samson’s pilots carried a revolver, binoculars and a lifebelt or an empty petrol can to hold on to in case they fell into the sea. The observers were equipped with a rifle, charts and a watch.

On Tenedos an airfield 800 yards long had been constructed with the aid of Greek workmen who uprooted a vineyard and with oil drums filled with cement rolled the ground moderately flat. But it was not altogether a satisfactory base. From the island the Gallipoli peninsula could be clearly seen, but Cape Helles was seventeen and a half miles away, and Gaba Tepe, where the Australians and New Zealanders were to land, thirty-one miles, and these were formidable distances for an aircraft in those days. Constantinople, of course was out of the question.

Despite these hazards Samson, doing a great deal of flying himself, was already beginning to produce useful results. Carrying volunteer naval officers as observers – usually light-weight midshipmen – he got his new radio-telephone into use, and the spotting for the Fleet’s guns greatly improved. Since the radiotelephone was a one-way system the warships checked back the messages they received with a searchlight. Several bombardments had been carried out in this way, notably the raid on Maidos on April 23.

Much the most important part of Samson’s work, however, in these last days before the attack was his photography of the enemy entrenchments. Hamilton and Keyes together made a close study of these photographs, and were not reassured. At all but one or two places where the landings were to be made there were abundant signs of barbed-wire. This wire was becoming a nightmare in all their minds, and Hamilton privately confided to Samson that he feared that the casualties might be as high as fifty per cent in the first landing. Had they been able to get hold of some of the Navy’s new armoured invasion boats it might have been a different story – but these were a closely guarded secret in the Admiralty at the time, and not even Kitchener was supposed to know anything about them.

When Hamilton had left the Dardanelles in March it had been understood that the Navy would keep harassing the Turks with a series of bombardments along the coast; but now it was found that all such operations were impossible. The entire energies of the Fleet were consumed in the arrangements for the landing. It was decided that the bulk of the invasion force should assemble in Mudros Harbour in the island of Lemnos, with subsidiary bases on Imbros, Tenedos and Skyros. Forty-eight hours before the landing the Fleet with the Army on board would start to move towards its battle stations off the Gallipoli peninsula. A mile or two from the coast the soldiers would be transferred to lighters and small boats and these, in groups of four, would be towed by launches to the shore. The actual landing would take place in the first light of dawn, the assaulting troops carrying with them nothing more than 200 rounds of ammunition, their rifles and trenching tools and three days’ rations.

All this required elaborate preparation: the construction of tows and wharves and barges; the training of midshipmen in piloting launches to fixed points on the strange coast in darkness; the study of the currents and the weather; the arrangements for getting animals on shore and the piping of fresh water from the ships to the beaches; the fixing of signals and codes; the allotting of targets to the battleships and cruisers which would support the landing; the working-out of the whole vast time-table for the movements of the Fleet. Every problem was new or at any rate unusual; there was even a plan for evacuating the Army in case the assault miscarried either in part or altogether.

Meanwhile Hamilton’s 75,000 men had to be transported from Egypt to the islands, a distance of some 700 miles.

Astonishingly – even miraculously – these arrangements and many others went forward without any major setback. Just once the crew of a transport on its way to Lemnos was forced to abandon ship when a Turkish destroyer appeared, but the enemy torpedoes went clean under the vessel’s keel and soon the men were scrambling back on board. Chased by British destroyers the Turkish ship ran for the shore, and beached herself off Chios. Even the weather seemed to prove that Hamilton had been wise to delay, for there were hardly two fine days together in the first fortnight in April. Provisionally the day for the assault was fixed on April 23, which was St. George’s Day; the moon then was due to set two hours before dawn, and thus the armada would be able to approach the coast in the darkness. But on April 21 half a gale set in, and the attack was postponed, at first twenty-four and then forty-eight hours. Finally Sunday, April 25, was chosen as the day.

The island of Lemnos, which had been loaned to the Allies by the Venizelist government in Greece, is reputed to be the abode of Vulcan, and the Argonauts are said to have rested there for a time. By the standards of the Ægean Sea it is not, however, a beautiful place. Few trees can be made to grow, and the local inhabitants have never been able to scratch much more than a bare living from the harsh volcanic rock and the surrounding sea. An uneventful timeless life goes by.

This island now became, in April 1915, the scene of one of the great maritime spectacles of the war. Ship after ship steamed into Mudros Harbour until there were some two hundred of them anchored there, and they made a city on the water. In addition to the warships, every possible variety of vessel had been pressed into service to transport the troops: brightly-painted Greek caiques and pleasure steamers, trawlers and ferryboats, colliers and transatlantic liners. Among the long lines of great battleships and cruisers some vessels, like the Russian cruiser Askold, became great objects of wonder. The Askold carried five extremely tall perpendicular funnels, and the soldiers at once renamed her the Packet of Woodbines. Then there was the ancient French battleship Henri IV, which had scarcely a foot of freeboard and a superstructure so towered and turreted that she looked like a medieval castle, a Braque drawing in heavy grey. These antiquities found themselves lying side by side with the latest submarines and destroyers.

A detached observer might have found the scene almost gay and regatta-like. From shore to ship and from ship to ship swarms of motor-boats and cutters ran about. Every vessel flew its flag, the smoke from hundreds of funnels rose up into the sky, and from one direction or another the sound of bugles and military bands was constantly floating across the water. There was movement everywhere. On the crowded ships the men who were to make the first assault were exercised in getting down rope ladders into boats. Others drilled on deck. Others again exercised the animals on shore. By night thousands of lights and signal lamps sparkled across the bay.

In the midst of this scene, dominating it and imparting an air of great strength and resolution, rode the flagship, the Queen Elizabeth, in which Hamilton had decided to make his headquarters with de Robeck until he was able to set up on shore on the Gallipoli peninsula.

An immense enthusiasm pulsated through the Fleet. With the sight of so many ships around them it seemed to all but a few sceptics more certain than ever that they could not fail. Everyone was delighted when the men scrawled slogans across the sides of their transports: ‘Turkish Delight’; ‘To Constantinople and the Harems’. They lined the decks shouting and cat-calling to one another, cheering each ship that arrived or departed from the harbour. Finally the excitement of the adventure had seized upon everybody’s mind, and the inward choking feeling of dread was overlaid by an outward gaiety, by the exaltation and otherworldness that chloroforms the soldier in the last moments of waiting.

The morning of April 23 broke fine and dear, and de Robeck gave orders for the operations to begin. All that day and on the day following the slower transports amid cheers moved out of Mudros and steamed towards their rendezvous off the beaches. By the evening of Saturday, April 24, the 200 ships were in motion, those carrying the Royal Naval Division headed for the Gulf of Saros, the Anzac contingent making for Imbros, the British and the French for Tenedos. The sea was again unsettled, and a sharp wind blew. As dusk fell a wet three-quarter moon with a halo round it was seen in the sky, but presently this halo cleared away, bright moonlight flooded the night, and the waves began to subside to perfect calm.

Hamilton, going aboard the Queen Elizabeth, found a signal waiting for him. Rupert Brooke was dead. His sunstroke had developed into blood poisoning, and he had died on a French hospital ship at the island of Skyros, just a few hours before he was due to set off for Gallipoli. Freyberg, Browne, Lister and others of his friends had carried him up to an olive grove on the heights of the island, and had buried him there with a rough pile of marble on the grave.

Towards midnight the warships with the assault troops on board were beginning to reach their battle stations. When they were still out of sight of land the ships came to a dead stop, all hands were roused, and a meal of hot coffee and rolls was given to the soldiers. In silence then, with their rifles in their hands and their packs on their backs, the men fell in on numbered squares on deck. There seems to have been no confusion as each platoon went down the ladders hand over hand, and directly the boats were filled they were towed by pinnaces in groups to the stern. The moon had now set, and there remained only a faint starlight in the sky. The battleships, each with four lines of boats behind it, steamed slowly forward again towards the shore. Soon after 4 a.m. the outline of the coast became visible through the early morning mist. An utter stillness enveloped the cliffs; there was no sign of life or movement anywhere.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A STRANGE light plays over the Gallipoli landing on April 25, and no matter how often the story is retold there is still an actuality about it, a feeling of suspense and incompleteness. Although nearly half a century has gone by, nothing yet seems fated about the day’s events, a hundred questions remain unanswered, and in a curious way one feels that the battle might still lie before us in the future; that there is still time to make other plans and bring it to a different ending.

Hardly anyone behaves on this day as you might have expected him to do. One can think of half a dozen moves that the commanders might have made at any given moment, and very often the thing they did do seems the most improbable of all. There is a certain clarity about the actions of Mustafa Kemal on the Turkish side, and of Roger Keyes with the British, but for the others – and perhaps at times for these two as well – the great crises of the day appear to have gone cascading by as though they were some natural phenomenon, having a monstrous life of its own, and for the time being entirely out of control.

For the soldiers in the front line the issues were, of course, brutally simple, but even here the most implausible situations develop; having captured some vital position a kind of inertia seizes both officers and men. Fatigue overwhelms them and they can think of nothing but retreat. Confronted by some quite impossible objective their lives suddenly appear to them to be of no consequence at all; they get up and charge and die. Thus vacuums occur all along the line; while all is peace and quiet in one valley a frightful carnage rages in the next; and this for no apparent reason, unless it be that men are always a little mad in battle and fear and courage combine at last to paralyse the mind.

Even the natural elements – the unexpected currents in the sea, the unmapped countryside, the sudden changes in the weather – have a certain eccentricity at Gallipoli. When for an instant the battle composes itself into a coherent pattern all is upset by some chance shifting of the wind, some stray cloud passing over the moon.

And so no programme goes according to plan, never at any moment through the long day can you predict what will happen next. Often it is perfectly clear to the observer that victory is but a hairsbreadth away – just one more move, just this or that – but the move is never made, and instead, like a spectator at a Shakespearean drama, one is hurried off to some other crisis in another part of the forest.

The movements of both the commanders-in-chief were very strange. Instead of putting himself aboard some fast detached command vessel like the Phaeton, with adequate signalling equipment, Hamilton chose to immure himself in the conning tower of the Queen Elizabeth, and thereby he cut himself off both from his staff and from direct command of what was happening on shore. The Queen Elizabeth was a fighting ship with her own duties to perform quite independently of the commander-in-chief, and although she was able to cruise up and down the coast at the General’s will, she could never get near enough to the beaches for him to understand what was going on; and the firing of her huge guns can scarcely have been conducive to clear thinking. Hamilton, in any case, had resolved before ever the battle began not to interfere unless he was asked – all tactical authority was handed over to his two corps commanders, Hunter-Weston with the British on the Cape Helles front, and Birdwood with the Anzac forces at Gaba Tepe. Since these two officers also remained at sea through the vital hours of the day they too were without accurate information. Signalling arrangements on the shore began to fail as soon as the first contact with the enemy was made, and very soon each separate unit was left to its own devices. Thus no senior commander had any clear picture of the battle, and battalions divided by only a mile or two from the main front might just as well have been fighting on the moon for all the control the commanders exercised upon them.

On several occasions Hamilton might have committed a mobile reserve of troops with the most telling consequences, but it never occurred to him to do this without his subordinates’ approval, those same subordinates who were almost as much in ignorance as he was, and in no position to approve or disapprove of anything. And so all day the commander-in-chief cruises up and down the coast in his huge battleship. He hesitates, he communes with himself, he waits; and it is not until late that night that, suddenly and courageously, he intervenes with a resolute decision.

Liman von Sanders’ actions on April 25 were more understandable but hardly more inspired. He was at his headquarters in the town of Gallipoli when, at 5 a.m., he was woken with the news that the Allies had landed. There were, he says, many pale faces around him as the reports came in. The first of these reports arrived from Besika Bay, south of Kum Kale in Asia: a squadron of enemy warships was approaching the coast there with the apparent intention of putting a force ashore. This was quickly followed by news of the actual landing of the French at Kum Kale, and of heavy fighting on the peninsula, both at Cape Helles and near Gaba Tepe. Still another part of the Allied Fleet had steamed up into the Bay of Saros and had opened fire on the Bulair lines. Which of these five advances was the main attack?

Liman judged that it must be at Bulair. This was the point where he could be most seriously hit, and he felt bound to safeguard it until he knew more clearly which way the battle was going to go. Ordering the Seventh Division to march north from Gallipoli (that is to say away from the main battle) he himself with two adjutants galloped on ahead to the neck of the peninsula. While the early sun was still low on the horizon he drew rein on a high patch of ground near the Tomb of Suleiman the Magnificent and looked down on to Saros Bay. There he saw twenty Allied warships firing broadsides on the shore, with the shells of the Turkish batteries erupting in the sea around them. It was not possible to estimate how many soldiers the enemy had brought to this attack, because a high wall made of the branches of trees had been laid along the decks of the ships, but boats filled with men were already being lowered into the sea. They came on towards the beaches until the Turkish machine-gun fire thickened about them. Then they turned and retired out of range, as though they were waiting for reinforcements before renewing the assault.

Liman was studying this scene when Essad Pasha, one of his Turkish corps commanders, brought him the news that the troops in the toe of the peninsula, some forty miles away to the south-west, were being hard pressed and were urgently calling for reinforcements. Essad Pasha was ordered to proceed at once by sea to the Narrows and take command there. But Liman himself lingered on at Bulair. Even when Essad reported later in the day from Maidos that the battle in the south was growing critical, Liman still could not bring himself to believe that the landings near Gaba Tepe and Cape Helles were anything more than a diversion. However, he dispatched five battalions by sea from Gallipoli to the Narrows, while he himself remained behind in the north with his staff.

That night the fire from the enemy warships off Bulair died away, and when no further action followed in the morning Liman was persuaded at last that the real battle lay in the peninsula itself. He then took a major decision: the remainder of the two divisions at Bulair were ordered south, and he himself proceeded to Mal Tepe, near the Narrows, to take command.

Thus on both sides the opening phases of the battle were fought in the absence of the commanders-in-chief; each having made his plan stood back and left the issue to the soldiers in their awful collision on the shore.

The behaviour of the Turks is another part of the mystery. It is true that they were defending their own soil against a new Christian invasion from the west. They had their faith, and their priests were with them in the trenches inciting them to fight in the name of Allah and Mahomet. For many weeks they had been preparing for this day; they were rested and ready. But when all this is said, one still finds it difficult to understand their esprit de corps. For the most part they were illiterate conscripts from the country, and they fought simply because they were ordered to fight. Many of them had been without pay for months, they were poorly fed and badly looked after in every way; and the discipline was harsh.

One would have thought that these things would have been enough to have broken their spirit when the first dreadful barrage fell upon them from the sea. Yet, with one or two exceptions, the Turks fought with fantastic bravery on this day, and although they were always out-gunned and out-numbered their steadiness never forsook them. They were not in the least undisciplined in the way they fought; they were very cool and very skilful.

Nor is the conduct of the Allied soldiers very easily explained. Certainly they had the expedition feeling; they were young and consequently they believed that they could do anything. Yet very few of Hamilton’s troops had ever come under fire before or had ever killed a man or seen death around them. The midshipmen who took the boats to the shore were hardly more than children, and even the professional French and British soldiers had little conception of the nature of a modern battle, let alone so strange and perilous an operation as this. In the case of the Australians and New Zealanders there was not even a tradition to guide them, for there had been no wars at all in their country’s past. They had no immediate ancestors to live up to – it was simply a matter of proving themselves to themselves, of starting a tradition here and now.

The unknown, which is the real destroyer of courage, pressed more heavily on the Allies than the Turks, for these young men were a long way from their homes, most of them had lived much more protected lives than the Anatolian peasant, and now, at this first experience of war, they were the ones who had to get up into the open and expose themselves while the Turks remained in their safe and familiar trenches. Everything before the Allied soldiers was unknown: the dark sea, the waiting enemy, the very coast itself and all that lay beyond. And it was perhaps not very helpful that General Hunter-Weston should have made a proclamation to the 29th Division before the battle saying, ‘heavy losses by bullets, by shells, by mines and by drowning are to be expected.’ But none of this made any difference.

A wild exuberance seems to have seized upon everybody’s mind. The Australians rush ashore shouting ‘Imshi Yallah’, a phrase they had picked up in more careless days in Cairo. The sixteen-year-old British midshipman, standing up very straight at the tiller, grounds his boat on the sand, cries out some phrase from the football field, and such of his men who are still alive follow him ashore. The French doctor, operating in a ghastly welter of blood, makes a note in his diary, ‘I have sublime stretcher-bearers.’

They probably were sublime, for nearly everyone seems to have been possessed with an inhuman recklessness and selflessness on this day. On one beach alone no fewer than five Victoria Crosses were won within a few hours of the landing.

Still another decoration[11]11
  The D.S.O. It was in the following year that Freyberg was awarded the V.C. in France.


[Закрыть] was awarded to Lieut.-Commander Bernard Freyberg in circumstances which, though hardly typical of the fighting, do manage to convey perhaps as well as anything the curiously dedicated courage of the men. Freyberg, who was one of the party who had buried Rupert Brooke on Skyros two days before, came north with the Royal Naval Division, and as part of the pretended landing which was so successful in delaying Liman von Sanders at Bulair he was chosen to lead a boatload of soldiers ashore in the darkness. At the last moment, however, he pointed out that it was unwise to risk the lives of a whole platoon when one man would suffice. Accordingly he had himself taken towards the land in a naval cutter, and when the boat was still two miles from the coast he slipped naked into the icy midnight sea and swam ashore carrying on his back a waterproof canvas bag containing three oil flares and five calcium lights, a knife, a signalling light and a revolver. Reaching the beach after an hour and a half’s hard swimming, he lit his first flare, and then entering the water again swam on for another 300 yards to the east. Landing again he lit another flare and crept into some bushes to await developments. Nothing happened. He then crawled into the Turkish entrenchments, and finding no one about went back to the shore and ignited the third flare.

Freyberg’s chances of being picked up again in the expanse of black water in the bay were not very good, and by now he was suffering from cramp. But he loathed the idea of being made a prisoner of war; and so he went back into the sea and swam out into the darkness. He did not drown. When he was about half a mile from the shore the crew of the cutter caught sight of his brown oil-painted body in the waves. He was hauled on board and restored to life again.

Finally, among all these imponderables there remains the perplexing nature of the battlefield itself. Hamilton naturally made some effort to carry out a reconnaissance of the peninsula beforehand. Some of his senior officers had been taken up the coast in a destroyer to study the beaches and the cliffs, one or two of them had been flown over the scene; and there were Samson’s photographs. But none of these measures succeeded in conveying any real idea of the difficulties of the country, and the maps which were supplied to the officers were incomplete, if not downright inaccurate. In the case of the southern landing around Sedd-el-Bahr at Cape Helles there was at least some guidance to be had from the reports of the marines who had gone ashore during the naval bombardments in February and March. But the Gaba Tepe region, where the Anzac troops were to land, was unmapped and almost wholly unknown. It is still the most savage part of the whole peninsula.

From Chunuk Bair a hopeless maze of scrub-covered ridges drops almost sheer into the sea, and some of the ravines are so precipitous that nothing will grow upon their sides. There is no general He to the land; dried-up watercourses abruptly change direction and end in walls of gravel, each scarred crest leads on to another tangle of hills and formless valleys. Even with a map the eye quickly grows tired; by the very nature of their endless disparity the outlines dissolve and all shapes become one shape like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. There is, too, something unwanted and desolate in this scene; one feels that it has become a wasteland without any purpose or design in nature.