Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (21 page)

But of the three imperial campaigns the one most truly instinct with the grandeur and the hollowness of Empire was the one that ended in defeat. The British would presently forget they ever captured Baghdad or Jerusalem; Kut and Megiddo would mean nothing to the sons or grandsons of the soldiers; but long after the Empire had
ended altogether, Britons would remember the names of Gallipoli and the Dardanelles.

Pallid between their hills, linking the wine-dark waters of the Grecian world with the Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorus and the Black Sea, the straits called the Dardanelles had always been close to the British imperial consciousness. They lay at the core of the Eastern Question, that prolonged inquiry into the balance of authority. Only through this single channel, a mile wide at its narrowest point, could Russian ships gain access to the Mediterranean, and immediately beyond it lay Constantinople, the very crossroads of international power, where Asia and Europe faced each other, and the cold waters met the warm. What was more, the Dardanelles figured so largely in the classical education upon which English gentlemen were habitually raised, that every educated man knew of the myths and dramas that surrounded them, the heroes who frequented them, Xerxes and Leander, Priam and Ulysses. The southern gate of the Dardanelles was the Hellespont, where Leander drowned; nearby stood Troy itself, and all around lay the islands of the ancients, Lemnos and Imbros and Samothrace of the Gods.

In January, 1915, the British evolved a plan to force these famous
straits, and send a fleet through the Sea of Marmara to Constantinople.
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Ostensibly its first purpose was to give help to the Russian armies fighting the Germans in the east, and thus reduce pressure on the western front; but it was really to be a coup in the old style. Winston Churchill, at forty a dashing First Lord of the Admiralty, was its chief begetter, and he was a man brought up to the éclat of imperial enterprise. He believed that if the Royal Navy got through the Dardanelles fortifications, Constantinople would fall before its sheer presence. For a century, after all, the Navy had been the invincible arbiter. Even to Europeans it was daunting: to Asians it was incalculable, almost mystical. Faced with this intimidating instrument, Churchill reasoned, steaming admonitory towards the Golden Horn, the Turks would collapse in panic and possibly revolution. Imperial armies would occupy Constantinople, Germany would be threatened from the rear, at a bold stroke the whole war might be ended, and the British would hold in their hands the destinies of the nearer East.

The Navy itself had doubts about its mission. For all its prestige, it was no longer the close-hauled force of Nelson’s day, addicted to risk, blind eye and heart-on-sleeve. It had fought no equal enemy for a century, and had grown stately over the years. Though Fisher had pruned, fittened and toughened it, still an attack upon so narrow and strong a strait was against all the service’s instincts. Ship pitted against fort was bad enough at any time: ships committed at such a moment to a sideshow, far from the war’s centre, verged upon the irresponsible. Heavy guns would be needed to force a passage, and the commanders of British battleships were no longer men of piratical boldness. Their ships were holy to them: not merely their homes and their prides, but their trust and faith too—their cathedrals so to speak, in whose turrets and superstructures were embodied almost religious responsibilities. The right place for a
battleship, the Navy thought, when it was not fighting a fleet action, was safely in base behind torpedo nets, where the very fact of its existence was worth a couple of divisions.

Fisher, recalled at seventy-four to be First Sea Lord again, had misgivings himself. He had inspected the Dardanelles in 1900, when he had commanded in the Mediterranean, and he knew how strong were the forts, castles and emplacements, some modern, some mediaeval, which were embedded on each side of the Dardanelles from one end to the other. So it was mostly older battleships that he agreed, almost against his better judgement, to commit to the operation, reinforced for the sake of the alliance by a squadron of equally elderly French battleships. Most of them were due to be scrapped within the next fifteen months, and they were manned chiefly by crews left over from the Grand Fleet at home. Fired though by Churchill’s enthusiasm, for the two men loved each other, Fisher agreed to add two modern capital ships: the battlecruiser
Inflexible
, fresh from victory over the Germans in the battle of the Falkland Islands, and the
Queen
Elizabeth
, the latest, fastest, most powerful and most beautiful battleship in the Royal Navy, so new that she would actually do her gunnery trials in action.

Ship by ship—some came from China—this fleet was gathered in the eastern Mediterranean. With its twenty-two capital ships, and its supporting cruisers, destroyers, minesweepers and seaplane carrier, it was the biggest naval force ever seen in those waters. After a series of preliminary bombardments and raids, like solemn warnings or declarations of intent, on March 18, 1915, this argosy of Empire, White Ensigns hugely billowing, captains princely on their flying bridges, began its direct assault upon the Dardanelles. It was like the return of the Fleet to Malta, played now in earnest: a last demonstration of naval war in the high Victorian idiom.

We are told that few who went in with the Royal Navy that day ever regretted the experience, for in all the history of warfare there was never a more momentous spectacle. ‘The proud feelings that possessed us’, a petty officer wrote, ‘can scarcely be described.’ This was the imperial theatre at its most colossal. The Straits did not look impressive from the open sea, only a narrow slit of water between the low green headlands, but on that brilliant March
morning they did look ominously expectant. Everyone in the Fleet knew they were heavily defended; successive lines of minefields were covered by fixed guns on both shores, by mobile howitzers, by searchlights, submarine nets, and fixed torpedo tubes. Against these formidable defences the Royal Navy sailed head-on, fair and square, in the old style. There was no element of surprise. The objective was clear to all, the method self-explanatory. The Navy would destroy the Turkish guns, sweep the minefields and blast a way through to Constantinople.

When the Turkish gunners looked down the strait that morning, to the open sea between Cape Hellas and Kum Kale, they saw approaching them out of the south the towering grey forms of sixteen capital ships. In the van was the splendid
Queen
Elizabeth
, the largest warship ever to enter the Mediterranean, her unprecedented 15-inch guns cleared for action. Around and behind her sailed a chivalry of warships, old perhaps, actually Victorian most of them, but all the more threatening for their sense of age and grandeur: the British tall and castle-like, the four French ships squatter, uglier, like huge armoured toads or turtles.
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There were the unmistakable
Triumph
and
Swiftsure
,
which we last saw in Grand Harbour at Valletta; there was the wolfish
Inflexible
,
whose guns three months before had destroyed the
Scharnhorst
and
Gneisenau
,
fresh from the China Station, on the other side of the world; there was the old
Ocean
,
which had convoyed General Nixon’s expeditionary force to Basra; there were
Agamemnon
and
Lord
Nelson,
Majestic
and
Ven
geance,
Albion
and
Prince
George
and
Irresistible.
Their combined firepower was enormous, but their air of history was scarcely less imposing.

They failed,
Inflexible,
Irresistible,
Vengeance
and all, and instantly a myth was shattered. The Royal Navy was not omnipotent, and gunboat diplomacy, here carried to its ultimate expression, was no longer sufficient to discipline the natives. The battle lasted all day, nine in the morning to five in the evening, but the battleships never penetrated the Narrows, the strip of water between Kilid Bahr and
Chanak which was the neck of the Dardanelles, and the minefields were never cleared. All day long they bombarded the forts, trying to batter their way through. The noise of the guns echoed and reechoed, up and down the narrow waterway, clouds of cordite drifted between the headlands, the shores flashed with the fire of the Turkish guns. Among the forts the shells exploded in sprouts of black and brown, among the warships, hour after hour, the Turkish projectiles plunged with huge columns of spray. The sun shone all day, but it was obscured for hours at a time by the smoke, the dust and the spray of the battle.

The Turks showed no sign of surrender: it was the British who faltered. In the afternoon the minesweepers were sent into the Narrows. They were trawlers manned by civilian crews, and caught there as in a pool, in a storm of fire from both banks, shells lobbed from the howitzers on the bluffs, direct fire from the guns so close on either bank, they lost their nerve and turned tail. In that moment the battle was lost. When the French battleship
Bouvet
suddenly exploded, capsized and disappeared before everyone’s eyes in a couple of minutes—when the
Inflexible
hit a mine and withdrew, listing heavily, between the other ships to the open sea—when the
Irresistible
was mined too, abandoned, and left drifting towards the Asiatic shore—when the
Ocean
’s steering gear was hit, and she steamed in helpless circles before the Turkish guns—when the barrage of fire from the Turkish forts did not, like the guns of Alexandria thirty years before, wilter and die—when it proved that the mystique of the Royal Navy could not force a passage through the Dardanelles, the great ships, turning heavily in the narrow waters of the straits, abandoned the assault and disappeared to sea, where presently the Turkish lookouts on the heights could see their dark silhouettes and billowing smoke-trails scattered among the islands of the archipelago.

Of the 176 guns that defended the Dardanelles, only four had been put out of action; of the 392 mines, not one had been cleared; but the Fleet had lost 700 lives and three great ships. The Turks fearfully awaited a renewal of the attack next day, but it never came. An age was over, and the Royal Navy never again tried to win a war by sheer
superbia.

Fisher resigned—‘Damn the Dardanelles! They will be our grave!’
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Churchill wanted to try again, but he was overruled, and instead the commanders on the spot determined to land an army on the peninsula of Gallipoli, forming the western shore of the Dardanelles, and so open the way to Constantinople. One legend died, another was born. ‘A wonder’, is how one participant described the invasion of Gallipoli in 1915. ‘Yes, that is the word for those days. The scenes, the men, the actions, the great ships, the smell of thyme mixed with cordite, the knowledge that immortal history has been made before one’s eyes. I do not praise war, but there I saw deeds rise fully to the heights of a great issue, in a noble setting, giving a quality to those days, with all their suffering, that aeons of grey evolution can hardly attain.’

Everything about Gallipoli conspired to haunt men with this sense of tragic nobility. The peninsula itself was haunted, not by ghosts but by their absence. It was an arid, empty place, like a blank slate awaiting a message. Its hills, from whose summits one could see the straits on one side, the Aegean on the other, were covered with scented scrub, and it lay there sparse and aromatic, a long pile of land above the sea, ribbed everywhere, like an old skin, with gulleys and ravines. In summer it could be beautiful: the sunbaked downland of the peninsula, over whose expanses hawks hovered, through whose shrubbery lizards flickered; the silent strait below; the deep blue of the Aegean humped with its islands; the distant mountains of Anatolia grey-blue to the east. In winter it could be terrible: bitterly cold, eerie in some lights, above all sterile. Within sight across the water was the mound of Troy, with all its bright and high-flown memories. Below were the Dardanelles, through whose channel down the centuries had passed so many warriors,
kings and pilgrims. But nothing had ever happened on the Gallipoli ridge, and the hills with their severe Turkish names, Anafarta, Keretch Tepe, Sari Bair, stood there loveless in the sunshine, sinister in the shade.

To this place there came an imperial army. It was the first such force in the Empire’s history, and it was charismatic. Its soldiers bore themselves, so the poet John Masefield thought, ‘like kings in a pageant’, and its commander was a courteous and cultivated Scottish gentleman. Ian Hamilton, born in Corfu in the days when the British ruled the Ionian Islands, first entered the footnotes of history at Majuba Hill, where he was wounded, and since then had three times been recommended for the Victoria Cross. He loved the ‘storm and wild joy of battle’, and had seen more action than any other senior officer, certainly in Britain, probably in the whole of Europe: his left hand had been shrivelled since Majuba, his left leg had been shortened by a wound on the North-West Frontier of India, he had fought in Afghanistan and Burma and the Sudan and the second Boer War, and had been a military observer with the Japanese armies in their war against Russia in 1904. Yet he was not at all a belligerent figure, and he approached the military art sensitively, almost delicately, less like a general than an artist, or a stage director. Brave, imaginative, sixty-three years old, he went to Gallipoli in a spirit of grateful dedication, assured by Kitchener that if he won he might be winning not simply a campaign, but a war. As he sailed to his battle station the Aegean seemed to him ‘like a carpet of blue velvet outspread for Aphrodite’, and he observed the subsequent campaign with the same lyric response, compassionately, without ferocity or savagery: like a gentleman, in fact.