Gallipoli (18 page)

By now, at least, Ellis is far more used to his comrades in arms. He judges them to be ‘very nice fellows, but rough; if only one of them had a greater comprehension of the right and proper place to use the past and present tenses'.
³⁴

The mood of
AE2
's skipper, Lieutenant-Commander Dacre Stoker, by contrast, could not be more joyous across the board. For his idea has worked. After journeying to the seat of the Australian Government in Melbourne, he had obtained an interview with Defence Minister Senator Sir George Foster Pearce and passionately put the view that the best contribution Australia could now make to the war effort was to offer up
AE2
to the Admiralty in London. The Admiralty had subsequently accepted Pearce's ‘generous offer with many thanks'.
³⁵
And so now they are on their way.

True, it is a tad undignified to be towed all the way to Port Said behind HMAS
Berrima
, but there is really no alternative on long voyages. The main thing is they really might be able to see some action at last.

Equally pleased is Colonel John Monash, not only the Commanding Officer of the 4th Brigade but also the Commander of the convoy. For days, this citizen soldier of 30 years standing – the one-time dux of Scotch College, from a Jewish German family, boasting three degrees that rest on his towering intellect – has been so frantically engaged in the organisation of getting away that he has fallen ill. But now that they really are on the high seas, the sickness lifts and his spirits soar.

‘The fleet at sea is a truly magnificent and impressive sight,' he observes. ‘Standing on the bridge of the flagship … I can see the whole fleet spread out in regular formation and responsive to every signal as to course, speed and interval. I feel it is something to have lived for, to have been entrusted by one's country with so magnificent a responsibility.'
³⁶

As to Albert Jacka, the young forest worker from Victoria, he is nowhere so grand as on the bridge of the flagship but rather is right in the thick of the soldiers of the 14th Battalion, in the bowels of their troopship, HMAT
Ulysses
. And not for him, ramblings on the world and his place in it. Just a simple notation in his diary will do him: Left Albany about 9. A.M. Journeying to Columbo.
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LATE AFTERNOON, 13 JANUARY 1915, 10 DOWNING STREET, NO … WINSTON … NOT … QUITE

The war is not going well, and the sheer exuberance of that evening so long ago in front of Buckingham Palace is now long gone. Now, just six months into hostilities, more than 18,500 British soldiers have been killed in the war, the vast majority of them in France at the hands of the Germans – while the Royal Navy has 4000 dead from ten warships sunk.

The opposing forces entrenched on the Western Front are now in tight deadlock; the frontline is torpid.

And there is a torpor in today's long meeting, which gets heavier and ever more dreary as the meeting goes on. No matter how important the discussion points, a blanket of dreary drowsiness inevitably settles over a gathering many hours in, and this meeting of the War Council at 10 Downing Street is no exception. Instituted by Prime Minister Asquith after war was declared in August, and meeting over the green-baize-covered mahogany table in the Cabinet Room, the Council's putative purpose is to reach quick and momentous decisions by dint of having all the key decision-makers in the one place at the one time. At least, that's the theory.

And yet, truly to this point, it has been the glowering Secretary for War, Lord Kitchener – all moustache, machismo and menace – who makes the key decisions. The nation's most revered soldier, ‘Kitchener of Khartoum' does not take kindly to civilians – no matter how powerful they might be politically – telling
him
what should be done on matters of warfare. And this notwithstanding the facts that his is a Cabinet appointment and he is actually filling a civilian post, answerable to that Cabinet.

His attitude gives comfort to those present. ‘Everyone felt fortified,' the Secretary of the War Council, Lieutenant-Colonel Maurice Hankey, would later reminisce, ‘amid the terrible and incalculable events of the opening months of the war, by his commanding presence. When he gave a decision it was invariably accepted as final. He was never, to my belief, overruled by the War Council or the Cabinet, in any military matter, great or small. All-powerful, imperturbable, reserved, he dominated absolutely our counsels at this time.'
³⁸

On this day, however, there might be a change in the wind. Not only has this, only their eighth meeting in six months, been going since high noon – with only a brief break for lunch – as the shadows have fallen outside and the blinds have been drawn to shut out the winter cold, but the news and the plans are all so depressing. The casualty rate on the Western Front in France continues to be appalling and all for precisely no gain. Exactly as
The Labor Call
had predicted, thousands of soldiers from both sides continue to be ‘massacred like grasshoppers in a farmer's wheat field'.
³⁹

This does not stop Field Marshal Sir John French, Commander-in-Chief British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front – seated right beside Prime Minister Asquith, who is stealing furtive glances at the letter he has just received from dear Venetia – from asking for yet another major offensive. Passionately, this longtime military man, known as ‘a fighting general' (his walrus moustache bristles in rough syncopation with his personality), outlines his plans to strengthen the Western Front in key places. He needs 50,000 more men and is keen to break up the new armies such as the Anzacs and put them under existing formations of the British Army.

Asquith says little, and is in fact busy penning his reply to Venetia. Time dawdles in the stale air, as visions come of yet more waves of young men charging to their all but certain deaths. Papers are strewn across the table, and the mood is black. It is now that Winston Churchill, in his capacity as First Lord of the Admiralty, speaks up. A brilliant orator, a persuasive debater, a man with many gifts who feels at his most vibrant when organising those who bear arms, the 40-year-old has astutely waited all this time, until the meeting is at its lowest ebb, before pushing the plan he has been working on for weeks. It is a plan that really will at last outflank the Germans, that will bring the Royal Navy at last into play, that will likely knock out one enemy country while immeasurably aiding an ally country. If it can just be executed properly!

Yes, he wishes to force a passage through the Dardanelles. Once through the Narrows, His Majesty's Navy could steam through the Sea of Marmara all the way up to Constantinople and send salvo after salvo of heavy-artillery shells right into the heart of the densely packed and thinly defended city, until the Ottoman Empire is brought to its knees. Constantinople would fall, as would the Ottoman Government, and the blockade that keeps Russia from sending out its wheat to the world's markets would be lifted.

As he has vociferously advocated, ‘An attack on the Gallipoli Peninsula, … if successful, would give us control of the Dardanelles and we could dictate terms at Constantinople.'
⁴⁰

A fortnight earlier, the War Council had received a personal appeal from the Russian Commander-in-Chief, Grand Duke Nicholas, that Britain make a ‘demonstration' against Turkey, ‘either naval or military',
⁴¹
so that his forces in the Caucasus could be relieved. This would fit the bill perfectly. At stake are the half-million troops of Balkan states – excluding Serbia, now busy fighting off the Austro-Hungarians – who had fought the Ottomans in 1912–13 and are clearly itching to do so again, to grab more of the Ottoman Empire, but who for the moment are remaining neutral until they see which way the war goes. With a forcing of the Dardanelles, those troops might very well come into play.

Churchill doesn't call his own idea genius, but that is certainly his belief – and that notwithstanding the fact that three years earlier he had written a Cabinet memorandum proclaiming that ‘it should be remembered that it is no longer possible to force the Dardanelles, and nobody would expose a modern fleet to such peril'.
⁴²
For he is now certain that, by sending ‘a comparatively small naval enterprise, directed at a vital nerve-centre of the world',
⁴³
so much could be achieved.

And yes, this
is
a subject he has raised before. At the meeting of the War Council just after Christmas, in fact, he had already made something of a case in a memo to the Prime Minister: ‘Neither side will have the strength to penetrate the other's lines in the Western theatre … although no doubt several hundred thousand men will be spent to satisfy the military mind on the point … Are there not any alternatives than sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders? Further cannot the power of the Navy be brought more directly to bear upon the enemy?'
⁴⁴
The difference is that this time he actually has a plan to show them, by virtue of a large map of the Dardanelles, and copies of cables he has exchanged with Admiral Carden.

In an instant, the dullness of the day is forgotten. This is
not
like Sir John's plan, to keep throwing lot after lot of 20,000 soldiers at a time at the Western Front, in the hope that the Germans will run out of live soldiers first. Churchill's plan is, potentially, militarily brilliant, quick in results and economic with lives. This is throwing their strongest military asset right at the weakest point of the enemy's defences. ‘The whole atmosphere changed,' Maurice Hankey would note. ‘Fatigue was forgotten, The War Council turned eagerly from the dreary vista of a “slogging match” on the Western Front to brighter prospects, as they seemed, in the Mediterranean. The Navy, in whom everyone had implicit confidence and whose opportunities had so far been few and far between, was to come into the front line.'
⁴⁵

For the moment, the Western Front is mercifully forgotten, as all get to grips with the possibility of sending the might and pride of the British Empire, the Royal Navy, through the ancient thoroughfare of the Dardanelles, right to Constantinople. There is something magical in the very prospect. Constantinople – standing at the veritable crossroads of the world, the place where twain twines, where Asia of the East really does meet Europe of the West, where Russia from the North must pass to get to the Mediterranean in the South – in British hands? Wonderful!

And Churchill has been busy, all right, working out just what is feasible, and arguing his case, in the words of the eloquent Welshman Lloyd George, ‘with all the inexorable force and pertinacity, together with the mastery of detail he always commands when he is really interested in a subject'.
⁴⁶

A fortnight earlier, gentlemen, on 3 January 1915, the First Lord of the Admiralty had cabled Vice-Admiral Sackville Carden:

Now, while Carden had replied two days later that in his view the Dardanelles could not be rushed, he had added:

A week later again, Carden had followed up with his views on just what would be required – that is, a dozen battleships, three battlecruisers, three light cruisers, 16 destroyers, one flotilla leader and four seaplanes, all of them supported by a dozen minesweepers and a score of attendant craft. He also wants six submarines, as the key hope of them all is to get the subs through the Dardanelles to the Sea of Marmara, where they would be able to play havoc with the main line of supply and reinforcement for the Turkish Army on the Gallipoli Peninsula.

Having considered Carden's response, it is Churchill's strong view ‘that a plan could be made for systematically reducing all the forts within a few weeks. Once the forts were reduced the minefields would be cleared, and the fleet would proceed up to Constantinople and destroy the
Goeben
. They would have nothing to fear from field guns or rifles, which would be merely an inconvenience.'
⁴⁹

And that is precisely what Churchill thinks should be done now. Three heavily armed modern battleships and about 12 old pre-dreadnoughts ought to do the job. As a matter of fact, Churchill feels so strongly about the prospects of forcing the Dardanelles that he has already committed to the cause the fastest, most thickly armoured and close to the most powerful warship that Britain has ever built, the just commissioned and supremely modern
Queen Elizabeth
– classed as nothing less than a super-dreadnought.

Instead of engaging in her calibration exercises in the Mediterranean for no result, she could test out her recently designed eight 15-inch BL MK1 guns and all the rest on the noggins of the recalcitrant Turks. (These are nothing less than the most powerful guns the Royal Navy has ever produced, each one furnished with 100 rounds of high-explosive 1920-pound shells, at a muzzle velocity of 2467 feet per second – 1650 miles per hour – with a range as far as 23,700 yards at 20 degrees elevation. Who better to test them out on than the Turks?)

And Churchill will quickly arrange for the plan of attack to be communicated to the French – together with a request for the cooperation of a French squadron under a French Rear-Admiral – while it is hoped the Russians might provide naval action at the mouth of the Bosphorus at the ‘proper moment'.
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