Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (22 page)

It was before he embarked for Gallipoli that Rupert Brooke wrote his elegiac poem ‘The Soldier’:

Englishry there was, cut to the finest bone, at Gallipoli. The 29th Division was one of the best formations of the Regular Army, and around its core of professionals, in the Royal Naval Divisions, in staff appointments and elegant ancillaries, some of England’s brightest spirits eagerly awaited the battle. There were young poets and writers—Masefield, A. P. Herbert, Compton Mackenzie, and Patrick Shaw-Stewart, perhaps the most gifted man of his generation, who was at twenty-five not only a distinguished poet and a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, but a managing director of Baring Brothers the bankers. There were sons of famous families, an Asquith here, a Herbert or a Napier there. Three members of Parliament fought at Gallipoli, and four future Field Marshals, and Governor-Generals of New Zealand and Australia, and a future Prime Minister of England, and Eric Partridge the lexicographer, and W. G. Grace’s son, and J. H. Patterson, author of
The
Man-Eaters
of
Tsavo.
Young Staveley, whom we saw hoisting the Union Jack in Khartoum, we meet again now as a landing officer at Gallipoli; some of the landing craft were commanded by midshipmen, fifteen years old and direct from Dartmouth; nothing could be more eternally English than the massive shire horses, shaggy-hoofed and imperturbable, who were shipped to Gallipoli to drag the army’s heavy howitzers up the beaches to their firing pits.

Then there were, like auxiliaries called to the service of Rome, the imperial contingents. They included Sikhs, Punjabis, Gurkhas, the Ceylon Planters’ Rifles, and the Assyrian Jewish Refugee Mule Corps, recruited in Egypt, commanded by Patterson the lion-hunter, whose badge was the shield of David, whose orders were given in Hebrew and in English, and who were said to be the first Jewish military unit to go into action since the fall of Jerusalem in
AD
70.

Above all they included the Anzacs, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, and these men more than anyone gave the campaign its epic allure. Some 30,000 strong, the Anzac divisions had spent some time in Egypt, and they were tanned from the
Mediterranean sun, and elated by the adventure of foreign travel so far from home. Nobody had seen such soldiers before. They were truly like men from a new world, or survivors from an older one. Tall, lean, powerful, cocky, their beauty was not merely physical, but sprang from their air of easy freedom. Their discipline was lax by British standards; they made terrible fun of British officers, and regarded the British other ranks with a mixture of pity and affectionate condescension; but they brought to Hamilton’s army a loose-limbed authority all their own, as though they were not the subjects of events, but their sardonic masters.

Curiously thrown together under the command of upper-class Britons, in the spring of 1915 this imperial army, with a French division attached, was assembled in scores of transports in the waters around Mudros, guarded by the warships of the Fleet. Never, perhaps, had an army been so exalted by the prospect of action. ‘Oh God!’ wrote Brooke, on his way to the Dardanelles, ‘I’ve never been so happy in my life, I think….’

It was to be the most ambitious amphibious operation in the annals of war, but it sailed to the peninsula unprepared. Its intelligence was out of date, its maps were inaccurate, it had insufficient shells, no dentists and very few mosquito nets. Two hospital ships were considered adequate for the campaign, and the Army made its own grenades out of old jam tins. Some officers, feeling themselves insufficiently briefed, took along Baedekers of Asia Minor, picked up in the second-hand bookshops of Egypt. Nobody had any idea how many Turks were defending the peninsula, and the entire staff of the Principal Naval Transport Officer consisted of a steward, a cook and a coxswain. Security was appallingly slipshod, and every stevedore in Alexandria knew the army was going to Gallipoli.

Hamilton’s plan, nevertheless, was bold. He would assault Gallipoli bullishly from the south and west, and fight his way up it to command the Dardanelles from end to end—‘take a good run at the peninsula and jump plump on, both feet together’. The first objectives would be the commanding heights of the peninsula, Achi
Baba
1
in the south, Sari Bair in the centre, and the main striking force would be the 29th Division, which would be landed on five separate beaches around Cape Helles, the southern tip of the peninsula. At the same time the Anzacs would land some thirteen miles up the coast, to strike across the peninsula for the central hills. The Fleet, with its terrific gunpower, would provide artillery support; the French would make a diversion on the Asiatic shore; Hamilton hoped that within three days the lower half of the peninsula would be captured, the Narrows would be cleared of their mines, and the Navy could pass through the Dardanelles into the Sea of Marmara. Handing over tactical command to his subordinates, as was his practice, Hamilton set the assault in motion and transferred himself to the
Qu
een
Elizabeth:
and in that magnificent vessel, surrounded by the transports of the army, the battleships, cruisers and destroyers of the Fleet, 200 ships in all, he set sail for Gallipoli on the night of April 24, 1915.

There would be, General Hunter-Weston assured the men of his 29th Division, ‘heavy losses by bullets, by shells, by mines and by drowning’. Still the army landed on Gallipoli confident and excited, a tremendous naval bombardment having preceded it. The Anzacs, as ‘enthusiastic amateurs’, had been given what was supposedly the easiest role: though they were landed in the wrong place, and found their maps quite useless, they got ashore with few losses, shouting scurrilities in pidgin Arabic, and struck inland with such gusto that by dawn that morning a few soldiers had actually reached the central ridge of the peninsula. On three of the British beaches, too, around the tip of the peninsula, there was little opposition. At Y beach there were no Turks at all: at S and X beaches there were only a few, and officers keyed up for blood and fire found themselves helped off their landing craft by solicitous sailors, in case they got their feet wet.

At two beaches only was the assault as bloody as Hunter-Weston had feared. At W beach the Lancashire Fusiliers ran into such violent resistance, from Turks hidden in trenches in the commanding bluffs, that in a matter of minutes 190 men were killed and 279 wounded, before the British could dig themselves in. It was the landing at V
beach, though, the southernmost beach and the most crucial, that was to provide in the first moments of the Gallipoli campaign a paradigm of the whole enterprise.

There the landing was to be made immediately below the village of Sedd-el-Bahr, where a mediaeval castle stood at the water’s edge like a memorial to more ancient battles. A collier, the
River
Clyde
(3,900 tons), was to be beached to act as a large landing-craft, and from its hull, it was hoped, 2,000 men of the Munster Fusiliers and the Hampshire Regiment would move across lighters to the beach, and so up the bluffs that rose, steep but not high, immediately behind. The assault went in silently at 6.20 a.m. The naval bombardment had ended, only a cloud of smoke and dust hung over the cape, and there was no sign of life at Sedd-el-Bahr. The sea was calm, the morning sunny, and this was one beach the British knew—Royal Marines had raided the place two months before. Gently and quietly, in perfect silence, the
River
Clyde
ran herself ashore beside the castle, towing her lighters, and at the same time a flotilla of boats approached the beach with a battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. Everything was silent. The place seemed deserted, or stunned by the awful bombardment.

But it was Magersfontein again, or perhaps the massacre of the British on the river at Cawnpore long before. The moment the boats grounded a vicious fusillade of machine-gun and rifle fire fell upon them, from hidden positions in the escarpment. The beach was an almost symmetrical crescent, like an amphitheatre, and the Irishmen scrambling ashore were as unprotected as actors on a stage. Boat after boat was riddled with fire, the soldiers jumping overboard, slumping over the gunwales, screaming or leaping terrified into the water. Boats full of dead men drifted away from the beach, or lay slowly tilting in the water, and a slow crimson stain of blood spread out to sea. Only thirty or forty survivors, scrambling up the beach, reached the cover of a ridge of sand, where they huddled helplessly beneath the bullets raging over their heads.

Meanwhile the captain of the
River
Clyde
, finding nothing to moor the lighters to, had leapt into the water with an able seaman and was holding the bridge of boats in position by his own muscles, crouching in the water with only his head and shoulders showing.
A few moments later, when the sally-ports of the collier were flung open, and the Munsters and Hampshires sprang out, they were met with a blast of fire like the smack of heat on a tropical day. They died almost as fast as they appeared, blocking the doors and gangplanks, falling into the sea: only a handful floundered ashore and took shelter with the Dubliners in the lee of the escarpment. The whole beach now was littered with corpses—‘like a shoal of fish’, said the Turkish commander—and through the noise of the battle one could hear always the cries of the wounded men, spread-eagled on the beach wire, or helpless in the shattered hulks of boats. When General Napier, the brigade commander, approached in a cutter to take command, the men on the
River
Clyde
shouted at him through the din to go back—‘Go back, go back! You can’t land!’ ‘I’ll have a damn good try’, the general shouted back: and almost at once he and his officers were slaughtered like the rest.

The hours dragged on in stalemate. At midday the vast form of the
Qu
een
Elizabeth
loomed inshore, and through a billowing cloud of green, black and yellow smoke, poured salvos into the bluffs above the beach. The little village was a ruin, the escarpment was pock-marked and crumbled with shell-holes, but still the Turks raked the beach with their fire. It was not until night fell that the men trapped in the
River
Clyde
could clamber ashore over the dead and wounded—and even then, when the moon came up a little later, the Turkish machine-gunners opened fire again. V beach lay that night in a confusion of anguish and disillusion. It started to drizzle later, and the troops slept there damply among their own dead and dying, while the guns chattered spasmodically all night long, and the great ships stood offshore in an ironic blaze of lights.

The imperial armies were ashore at Gallipoli, but the experience of V Beach was to be the true index of their enterprise, from which the romantic dedication was presently to depart, leaving only a reproach of muddled waste and heroism. Almost as the campaign began, news reached the armies that Rupert Brooke, their exemplar and their laureate, had not even reached the peninsula, but had died of blood-poisoning at sea, on St George’s Day, and had been buried on the island of Skyros. Hamilton was greatly moved. ‘Death grins
at my elbow’, he wrote. ‘I cannot get him out of my thoughts. He is fed up with the old and sick—only the flower of the flock will serve him now….’

The Gallipoli campaign lasted 259 days, April 1915 to January 1916. In all half a million men were landed on the peninsula. Far from capturing their objectives by the third day, the British never captured them at all, but were confined first to last to footholds on the shore. Within forty-eight hours of the landings the two allotted hospital ships were on their way to Egypt, full of wounded; even the Anzacs had been driven off the crest of the hills, almost back to their cramped beach at Anzac Cove, and their commander was recommending evacuation at once. So another legacy of the imperial years turned sour upon the British, for even after the failure of the naval assault they had supposed this to be another species of colonial war, against superior but demoralized Asiatics. It was well known, said a statement from Hamilton’s headquarters shortly before the attack, that many Turks ‘looked with envy on the prosperity which Egypt enjoys under British rule’, and anyway, as a staff officer wrote, the Turk had never shown himself as good a fighter as the white man. ‘Who could stop us?’ wrote an Australian private exuberantly before the landing. ‘Not the bloody Turks!’

Four months after the first assault a second invasion was launched, the landing this time being at Suvla Bay in the north, so that at the climax of the campaign there were three separate bridgeheads, with British forces north and south, Anzacs in the centre. But the three never joined up, and what began as a campaign in the imperial kind, a war of sweep and movement, degenerated into trench warfare, just as static, just as dispiriting, as the fighting in France. Only the setting was different, for behind the backs of the Gallipoli soldiers there lay always the tantalizing sea. Serene on the horizon lay the islands, and all around the peninsula were the warships and transports, always there, dowager-like among their torpedo nets, or moving majestically along the coast for another bombardment. Sometimes the soldiers awoke to see some famous ocean liner, the
Aquitania
or the
Mauritania,
standing offshore like a visitor from another world: at night the lights of all the warships, their searchlights playing, their signal lamps winking, suggested a great floating city, friendly and reassuring, and officers were sometimes taken out there, direct from their squalid dug-outs to the armchairs and starched linens of battleship wardrooms. The sea was always there, and always at the back of the soldiers’ minds, no doubt, was the thought that if the worst came to the worst in their long fight for the peninsula, the Navy could always snatch them off.