Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (23 page)

On May 25, though, the beloved and familiar
Triumph,
bombarding the Turkish positions from a station off the Anzac beach, was torpedoed by a German submarine. In full view of the soldiers she capsized with a deep metallic rumble, floated upside-down for half an hour, and sank. It was a traumatic shock. The Australians watched appalled, some cursing and crying with the horror of the spectacle, and from the hills above they could faintly hear the exultant cheering of the Turks. Within hours all the big ships were withdrawn to Imbros, and the soldiers, looking forlornly out to sea, saw them retreating fast into the evening, led by the battleships, with the smoke from their funnels trailing behind them. There was a momentary hush over the peninsula, as every man, British or Turk, watched them go. By nightfall they were out of sight. ‘All the ships had disappeared’, wrote a German officer, ‘as if God had taken a broom and swept the sea … the joy of the brave Turks can scarcely be described.’ The British felt a chill sense of abandonment, even betrayal, as darkness fell upon Gallipoli that night.

In hideous attack and counter-attack, interspersed with exhausted lulls, they passed the rest of 1915. Reinforcements arrived, ships came and went, twelve gunboats were built especially for service in the Danube when Constantinople was taken; British and Australian submarines, in feats of prodigious daring, passed through the Narrows and roamed the Sea of Marmara, sinking Turkish ships and sometimes bombarding roads—the submarine E11 actually reached Constantinople, torpedoed a freighter berthed beside the arsenal,
and started a panic in the capital.
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But on the peninsula nothing was gained. The battlefronts were often no more than a few hundred yards wide, and the salients never more than a few miles deep. The British at Cape Helles won the whole tip of the peninsula, but never got further than five miles inland: the dour mass of Achi Baba, so close across the rolling downland, was never any closer, and the soldiers were never out of sight of the very beaches where they landed. At Suvla Bay, in the north, they achieved even less, but floundered impotently about the flat lands near the beaches, losing 8,000 men and never reaching the high ground at all.
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As for the Anzacs, though in a thousand skirmishes they hacked their way up the cliffs above their beaches, they never captured the crest, but were immured there in the end like troglodytes or fossickers, in burrows and trenches scattered over the hillsides, and straggling squalidly down to the beach. Often the Turkish and British trenches were only a few feet apart, and the enemies could easily hear each other talking; by the winter the fronts were labyrinths of trenches, and every sap or redoubt had its familiar name—Dublin Castle, Half Moon Street, Courtney’s Post.

The beauty of the place, which entranced many of the soldiers when they first landed on Gallipoli, turned sour with time, and an overwhelming sense of decay fell upon the peninsula. No longer did the soldiers write with such delight of the glorious sunsets, the hyacinths and the heather. Now the landscape became terribly oppressive, as the spring gave way to the ferocious summer, and then to a wet raw winter. Flies swarmed everywhere over the
bridgeheads, day by day the wounded went away to the hospital ships queuing up offshore, the men grew dirtier, thinner, more unkempt, plagued by dysentery, septic sores, frostbite. ‘The beautiful battalions of April 25th’, Hamilton wrote, ‘are wasted skeletons.’ Corpses lay everywhere, blackened and unburied between the lines, or lost in inaccessible ravines, and their smell was inescapable: off the beaches the Navy tried to sink the floating bodies of horses and mules by churning them up with their propellers. The British infantrymen, patient as ever, grumbled their dispassionate obscenities: the magnificent Australians almost gave up being soldiers at all, fighting like brigands or guerillas, and sauntering among their dug-outs with their shirt-tails hanging out, or wearing nothing at all—‘like flies’, one New Zealander thought, ‘wandering about like aimless men’.

The beaches were a terrible mess, clogged with supplies, littered with makeshift jetties, tumbled about with debris, broken crates, half-sunken boats. Anzac Cove, it was said, looked as though everything had been washed ashore in a shipwreck: at Sidd-el-Bahr the scarred hulk of the
River
Clyde
still lay among the wreckage of her lighters. Along the tracks that led from beach to trenches, now dusty, now deep in mud, teams of mule-drawn wagons toiled; often groups of soldiers, escaping from their dug-outs, splashed about in the water; often too, in a desultory way, the Turkish gunners lobbed a shell down, to explode almost unnoticed in the sea, or splinter a few more boxes on the foreshore.

Always the noise of the battle continued on the heights above. It was never far away; it was seldom suspended; it was often savagely intense; it achieved nothing whatsoever. Of the 500,000 men who landed on the peninsula, first to last, rather more than half were killed or wounded, and though on several occasions they came heartbreakingly close to success, and the Turks suffered at least as severely as they did, still they might just as well never have gone to Gallipoli at all.
Was
it
so
hard,
Achilles?
asked Patrick Shaw-Stewart, looking across the Hellespont to the plain of Troy—

General Hamilton, one of the bravest and most experienced officers of the British Army, lacked one quality of generalship: fury. He was an optimist, but not a zealot. Considerately refraining from undue interference with his subordinates, he seems never quite to have grasped the whole momentum of the action into his own hands. His contact with the battle was more advisory than decisive. He felt for his soldiers, he was thoughtful to his commanders, he responded like an artist to the beauty and the tragedy of it all: but he was not a man to fall upon his enemies with a criminal hail of fire, steel and explosive, and he flatly refused, despite pressure from London, to use poison gas.

It was his tragedy that the Gallipoli campaign needed just such a man of blood, especially as some of his senior subordinates were abysmally inept. Risky at the best, Gallipoli was an action that could succeed only by outrage and audacity. A few more old ships sunk, and the Royal Navy might have burst through the Narrows. An instant advance from Suvla Bay, rammed home despite all dangers, and the whole peninsula might have been captured in a day. They were terrible chances to take, involving thousands of human lives, the immediate success or failure of an entire campaign, perhaps even of a war. Hamilton, a man of his time, an Edwardian gentleman, lacked the cruelty to take them. He failed by the narrowest of margins, for by the end of 1915 the Turks were almost at breaking-point: but in the conduct of great affairs, nothing fails like failure.

Gallipoli was the greatest reverse to British arms since the American Revolution, and if it was launched in a resurgence of the imperial bravado, it was lost in the deadweight of the imperial
tradition. Its senior commanders had all been nurtured in the colonial wars, a debilitating legacy, and the old burden of class, which Kipling had so anathematized after the Boer War, contributed again to the débâcle: all too often generals were remote from their men, if not in courage or
esprit
de
corps,
at least in everyday experience—or actually in physical distance, for sometimes they preferred to conduct their battles entirely from warships out at sea. The soldiers, though they fought on bitterly to the end, lost faith in their leadership. ‘Are we down-hearted?’ shouted a shipload of new arrivals, approaching the peninsula that summer. ‘You bloody soon will be’, came the mordant reply from a departing hospital ship.

For in the end a heavy pall of sadness hung over the exhausted armies, mourning so many friends. ‘For God’s sake,’ one officer wrote in his diary, ‘get me away from the Dardanelles!’ By the autumn of 1915 the British War Cabinet, looking bleakly out at the tragedy across the death-fields of France, had lost hope for the venture. Churchill was no longer at the Admiralty, and when Lord Kitchener came out to Gallipoli to see for himself, he recommended withdrawal. Game to the last and ready for another offensive, Hamilton was replaced by a very different general, the bluff and practical Sir Charles Monro: and by Christmas, silently and secretly, most of the army had been withdrawn from the peninsula.
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The British public was encouraged to think of the withdrawal from Gallipoli as a compensating triumph, like Rorke’s Drift after the defeat at Isandhlwana, or Mafeking after Black Week. Official accounts of the tragedy always ended with images of its success—the stealthy withdrawal from the forward trenches, the skilful assembly of guns, stores, horses, the boats stealing away muffled through the night, the watchful warships standing by, and finally, as the transports sailed off beneath the guns of the Fleet, the fires of burning stores and abandoned ammunition which at last revealed the truth to the Turks. ‘In that marvellous evacuation’, wrote Sir Julian Corbett, the official naval historian, ‘we see the national
genius for amphibious warfare raised to its highest manifestation.’ The Turks awoke on the morning of January 9, 1916, to find that not a British soldier was left in the crannies and hidden valleys of the peninsula. ‘I hope
they
don’t hear us go’, one Australian is supposed to have murmured, as his battalion stole through the graves of their comrades down the cliff-tracks to the boats.

But it is truer to the nature of the Gallipoli story, fairer to its soldiers, to end with a glimpse not of success in defeat, but of tantalizing failure in victory. On August 9, 1915, half-way through the campaign, the front element of British troops on the Anzac front had fought their way almost to the crest of Sari Bair, the central ridge of the peninsula and perhaps the key to all else. The ground up there was stony and serrated, rough at any time, now horribly cut about with shell-holes, gun-pits and lines of trenches: for weeks the opposing armies had struggled on those unhappy heights, now losing a vantage point, now winning a trench.

Soon after five o’clock that morning a small group of British and Gurkha soldiers fought their way, in savage hand-to-hand fighting, to the summit of the ridge. The Turks fled down the hill the other side, the British pursued them over the top: and suddenly they saw before them, for the first and only time, the object of their battle. There below them down the eastern slopes, only five miles away across the dun rolling countryside, blue in the morning sunshine they saw the Narrows. There was their objective. There were the old grey forts at the water’s edge, there the cluster of Chanak with its castle and its minaret, and only a few miles upstream the channel, swinging between its hills, broke away into the Sea of Marmara. They looked at it with awe and elation, wiping the sweat from their eyes, torn and breathless and bleeding from the fight, and for a moment felt the campaign had been won.

In a few minutes they were forced up the hill again, and leaving their dead behind them in the sunshine, retreated once more over the ridge.
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Many imperial instincts had found their epitome, or their disillusionment, in these several campaigns, so far from the crux of the world conflict. Gallipoli ended in total failure, the Middle Eastern campaigns, co-ordinated in their final phases, ended in absolute success, with the British armies sweeping far to the north, to Damascus, Mosul, Aleppo and the frontiers of Turkey. When the Turks sued for peace the British controlled the whole of the former Turkish Empire, except only the Arabian interior, and upon this achievement they would erect the last of their great imperial structures, an empire among the Arabs.

In a wider spectrum, too, the war at first seemed only to have strengthened the Empire. ‘The British flag’, Lord Curzon told the House of Lords after the Armistice in November, 1918, ‘has never flown over a more powerful and united Empire.’ For a time it had seemed that Joseph Chamberlain’s vision of imperial federation might after all be realized. The Imperial War Cabinet was described by Sir Robert Borden, Prime Minister of Canada, as a ‘Cabinet of Governments’, and was the nearest the Empire had ever come to the projected Grand Council. Jan Smuts, so recently a defeated enemy, became one of the most influential men in London. The victory celebrations in London were almost like the Diamond Jubilee again,
as soldiers from the four corners of the King’s dominions marched through the adulating crowds. The Empire seemed more than ever a band of brothers: men from Fiji and Egypt had served in France, men from Trinidad at Gallipoli, men from Belize and Hong Kong in Mesopotamia. Messages of congratulation flashed across the globe. Colonial Premiers basked in the benevolence of the Court, or were welcomed effusively at victory banquets. Emblems of Empire embellished the margins of Special Editions, or were woven into the sentiments of picture postcards. ‘Never while men speak our tongue’, wrote
The
Times
, ‘can the blood spent by the Canadians at Ypres and by the Australians and New Zealanders at Anzac be forgotten. That rich tribute of love and loyalty to the highest ideals of our race has not been wasted….’

It was true, and it was false. The Empire really had gone to war united, and it fought together to the end. Even India provided an army of 1½ million men, most of them volunteering for the money or the honour, but many out of loyalty too. As for the 25 million people of the ‘white’ Empire, they had sent 857,000 of their men overseas, and 141,000 of them were killed. A sense of common sacrifice and accomplishment really did give to the Empire’s scattered peoples a new and triumphant brotherhood—‘What remains to us?’ cried William Morris Hughes, the spectacular Welsh-born Prime Minister of Australia. ‘We are like so many Alexanders. What other worlds have we to conquer?’ The Empire was more powerful than ever, possessing at the end of the war not only the greatest fleet, but also the greatest air force in the world, and from the conflict it was to win great prizes: new territories in Africa and the Pacific, a whole new paramountcy in the Middle East.