Gallipoli (22 page)

Gallipoli Peninsula in relation to the Dardanelles, by Jane Macaulay

‘In weather like this,' General Birdwood asks his friend, ‘could the Navy really land and maintain troops ashore?'

The Admiral's answer is firm. ‘No. The small craft would soon be smashed to pieces on those open shores.'
³⁴

A landing could be manageable with harbours, but there aren't any. It all gives General Birdwood a great deal to think about. A bare beginning should have been to consult weather records before even starting operations in this area, but it has not been done. Orders are dictated from London by people consulting maps alone, with no appreciation for local conditions.

And if the Navy Admirals themselves have no confidence in maintaining his troops ashore, how could anyone else? Yet, there appears to be no stopping London, who are intent on this all going through, whatever the cost.

It is a worry all right …

28 FEBRUARY 1915, MENA CAMP, 3RD BRIGADE ARE ON THE MOVE

It is a worry all right. It remains classified information, not to be discussed openly, but there is no escaping the fact that 3rd Brigade are packing up and moving out of Mena Camp. It seems they have been selected for the supreme honour of undergoing some kind of special training, somewhere, as a possible prelude to making a landing on an enemy shore. Does this mean that the 1st and 2nd Brigade are going to miss out? Like all those being left behind, the newly promoted Captain Gordon Carter of 1st Battalion, 1st Brigade certainly hopes not! Everyone has continued to train hard, and as the weeks have passed they have become ever more eager to test themselves in an actual battle.

As the 3rd Brigade march out in the afternoon, they do so to the cheers of the Australian soldiers of the 1st and 2nd Brigade, and the music provided by a combined band of the 1st and 3rd Battalion. Gordon Carter cheers with the best of them, but he still needs cheering up when they are gone; the camp seems so barren without them. And what better thing to cheer himself up than to take his sister ‘Fuff' and her friend Nurse King out for another donkey ride round some of the native villages? By this time Nurse King is his friend, too, and though they are not ‘courting', really, the two still manage to see each other whenever they are both off duty – going to dinner and dancing, visiting the zoo, riding on the scenic railway, climbing the pyramids, taking the donkeys ‘Sphinxing', going for drives to the delta. For her part, Lydia King is impressed. ‘Had dinner at Shepheard's,' she records in her diary. ‘Gordon was in a very confidential mood, he is just a nice brother. I like him immensely; we spent about two hours at dinner and went out in the garden for a while, and watched the dancing …'
³⁵

For his 30th birthday, she gives him a lovely khaki tie, and he looks ever so smart.

4 MARCH 1915, THE WAR COUNCIL MEETS AGAIN

On this morning, Winston Churchill receives two telegrams from Vice-Admiral Carden in the Dardanelles, informing him that although bad weather has ‘moderated operations', his latest estimate of how long it will take to get through to the Sea of Marmara, excluding bad weather, is just ‘fourteen days'.
³⁶

In the meantime, at least all the forts at the entrance to the Dardanelles are ‘practically demolished'.
³⁷

Having appraised the situation, Birdwood cables Kitchener, stating his contrary opinion, that ‘it must be very doubtful if the Navy could force a passage unassisted, and … any military operations in their support must be of a major rather than a minor character'.
³⁸
If it comes to a mass landing of troops, he believes Cape Helles will be the best spot.

Lest Birdwood get the wrong idea, Kitchener's reply on 4 March is stern:

But Birdwood insists.
He
is not looking from maps.
He
has personally surveyed the ground with his looking glass, and his cable to Lord Kitchener on 5 March is pointed:

And when Lord Kitchener
still
tries to argue the point, Birdwood is unbowed, replying promptly on 6 March:

Another thing that worries everyone is the seeming inability of the British minesweepers to make any real headway in clearing a passage through the minefields. On the first three days of the month, they have made three night-time forays, coming under heavy fire each time. They are forced to turn tail – all without destroying a
single
mine.

6 MARCH 1915, CAIRO, WHISTLING IN THE DARK

And what's this now? As dusk falls on Maadi Camp, a curiously melodic but piercing whistle is heard. Heads pop out of tents and gaze at the source: a strapping member of the Light Horse who is striding up and down each row. With each few steps, another whistle.

And now a shout.

In his tent, Ric Throssell has been penning a letter home when he hears the very whistle he and his brother would use to get each other's attention from a distance on their farm at Cowcowing. He puts his head through the tent flap, and sure enough, it is Hugo, just arrived from Australia with the last contingent of the 10th Light Horse!

Ric returns the piercing whistle, and on the instant, Hugo turns.

‘Ric, old man! Is that you?' Hugo roars as the two come together and embrace, Hugo thumping his older brother on the back. ‘How are you? It's great to see you.'
⁴²

8 MARCH 1915, DARDANELLES, THE SEEDS ARE LAID

Slowly. Carefully.

With infinite caution, beneath a dim half-moon, the tiny Turkish minelayer
Nusret
gets about its business.

It is the graveyard hours – right on the cusp of being very late at night and very early in the morning – and the darkness is helped even more by the thick fog that has so propitiously rolled in. To even better disguise their presence from enemy scouts, the Turks have painted the sides of the ship black, a change from its usual battleship grey.

Captain Tophaneli Hakki, along with the Commander of the Mine Group, Captain Hafız Nazmi, is on a sacred mission, one so important that he has to ignore the fact that he had a heart attack just a few days earlier. With just 26 mines left in the Turkish armoury, it has been decided to lay them all here, in Erenkeui Bay, parallel to the shoreline. It had not escaped the notice of the Commander of the Forts, Major-General Cevat, that in their previous attacks in February, the British Fleet had often used this widest part of the Straits – about five miles from Asia to Europe – as a spot to turn around.

Despite the darkness and fog and light rain on this night, the few lamps the Turkish sailors use are shielded by blankets held up so that the light travels no further than those working with the mines.
No one
, no enemy spy who might chance to be on the shore, must know of this minefield.

Now, given that each mine is capable of sinking a battleship, let alone their own tiny vessel, the key for the men is not to activate them before they hit the water. Thus, the last act before submerging them, accomplished by the Chief Engineer, is to pull a pin situated on the topsides.

The upper half of each contact mine is studded with hollow lead knobs, known as ‘Hertz horns', and inside each one is a glass vial filled with sulphuric acid. Should the hull of a ship come into contact with the knob, it is crushed, breaking the vial and releasing the sulphuric acid, which runs down a tube into a lead–acid battery, which lacks precisely that acid to generate an electrical current. The instant the acid hits, a current detonates the tightly packed explosive within the mine.

After each mine is carefully picked up off the deck by the steam-driven crane and lowered gently over the side and into the sea, it is quickly followed by the anchor and steel cable that will secure its position at whatever depth is required, and then that position is carefully – oh so carefully, my friend, Mehmet – noted on the map, recording the bearings of the drop to key landmarks. Ideally, the mines lie in a line, like an underwater curtain drawn in front of invading ships.

Well before dawn, allowing
Nusret
plenty of time to get away, it is done. The 11th line and the final 26 mines are laid in a north–south direction, 100 yards apart, a mile off the Asian shore. There they bob in the current, giant sacs containing the seeds of destruction for whichever vessel hits them, about two and a half fathoms below the surface. Just let any British vessel move through those waters and they will surely be destroyed.

It is with some satisfaction that, upon
Nusret
's return to base, Major Hafiz reports on their sacred mission: the enemy did not detect us.
⁴³
Allah be praised.

10 MARCH 1915, AT LAST, A BREAKTHROUGH

Finally, the cables from General Birdwood persuade the great man. If he says that the Dardanelles cannot be forced unaided, then Lord Kitchener feels he must take Birdwood at his word and – given that the situation on the Eastern Front in Russia appears to have calmed – on this day he makes his announcement to the War Council.

‘I feel,' he says, ‘that the situation is now sufficiently secure to justify the dispatch of the 29th Division.'
⁴⁴

Victory for the Easterners over the Westerners!

And so the word goes out. The 29th Division is finally fully mobilised, and the transports bearing them, which could have and should have left on 22 February had Kitchener not intervened, now prepare to leave on 16 March.

Perhaps foremost in the troops of the 29th are the 1st Battalion of the Dublin Fusiliers, 1100 strong, billeted at Torquay. It is with great relief that they finally receive the call-up, peppered with sanguine regret at leaving their fine hosts. Before departure, their Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Alexander Rooth – a 49-year-old graduate of Sandhurst who has been with the Dublin Fusiliers for 30 years – hands the regimental colours to Torquay's mayor, for safekeeping.

So highly regarded are the 29th Division that just a couple of days later they are even presented, at his request, to His Majesty King George! Formed up along the London Road in Warwickshire, this mighty force of 19,000 Regular Army veterans stretches no less than two miles, each man a model of military decorum, with closely trimmed moustaches, ramrod backs, pressed uniforms and shining boots. Their artillery gleams, and their perfectly groomed horses whinny in seeming unison. Not for nothing would one staff officer say of them, ‘never has there been such a division'.
⁴⁵

And that certainly appears to be the view of His Majesty, as, with his entourage, he slowly rides his royal steed Delhi along the road in front of his soldiers, inspecting them. While the soldiers, of course, must show no emotion, and can only come to rigid attention as their Sovereign passes, His Majesty is under no such constraints and positively beams as he gazes down upon them. This ‘splendid body of men',
⁴⁶
as he refers to them, after they have done a march-past eight-abreast, are no less than a credit to the British Empire. They are the finest troops in the land and, likely, the world.

LATE AFTERNOON, 11 MARCH 1915, ABOARD
INFLEXIBLE
, TENSION MOUNTS

Anchored near Tenedos, Vice-Admiral Carden can barely stand it. Another morning, another cable from Winston Churchill pressing him to ever more action. Yes, the First Lord of the Admiralty is polite about it, but this one is particularly pointed:

What to do? For the moment Carden does nothing, bar worry himself sick.

Sick.

12 MARCH 1915, LONDON CALLING

Life is not a symphony. It does not flow, rise and fall, all as part of a rhythm whereby every moment is connected to the next by genius, man's or otherwise. Sometimes, extraordinary turning points in a man's life have no preamble, no hint, no hum, no nothing. It all just happens.

On this morning, General Sir Ian Hamilton is simply getting about his business at the Horse Guards – being Commander-in-Chief of the Central Force, charged with defending His Majesty's Kingdom – when, just as the chime of Big Ben is sounding ten times in the distance, an orderly arrives. The Secretary for War, Lord Kitchener, wishes to see him at the War Office.

The orderly does not have to add ‘now'. With Kitchener, a summons is always immediate, and it would be unthinkable to protest that you have something else on. He is
Lord Kitchener
. He wishes to see you.
Now.