Gallipoli (37 page)

Only a few body lengths up the cliffs, MacLagan yells out from the beach: ‘Beevor, get your men to give a cheer.'

Turning, amused, Beevor does not have time to pass on the order when ‘such a roar came from along the line of “Beevor's Little Lambs” as must have given the Turks in the vicinity an idea of the kind of lads who were invading their territory'.
⁶⁴

Another soldier who is climbing at a different spot, Private Basil Wilmer, the son of a Reverend from the town of Carrick in Tasmania, would later report their ‘awful climb, the cliffs being quite 300 ft. high and almost perpendicular, sandy, and covered with low, thick scrub' and that ‘the air above seemed full of a swarm of angry bees'.
⁶⁵
Near the top, two of his comrades either side are shot almost simultaneously. Private Wilmer stops to check on one of them, an old soldier named Batt, but the old fellow waves him away, saying, ‘Don't mind us, lad; go on and give it to them hot.'
⁶⁶

All around, the Australians are forming their first impressions, with one Australian soldier later quipping, ‘it was bloody poor farming country'.
⁶⁷

Aboard
London
, Ashmead-Bartlett suddenly hears a cheer coming back over the waters, an indication that perhaps there is a first victory – likely a trench taken. Indeed, just as Ashmead-Bartlett has guessed, the trench on the top of the 300-foot-high Plugge's Plateau that begins the First Ridge, from where the men of Faik's second platoon have finally fled, is at last conquered.

And all of it by bayonet – giving to the Turks, in the words of Trooper Bluegum, ‘just what Brutus, Cassius, Casca and the rest gave Julius Caesar'.
⁶⁸
For
still
the Australians have not paused long enough to fire.

Among those in the lead, which is typical of him, is 40-year-old Captain William Richard Annear, of the 11th Battalion. A fine man and a natural leader, he had been among the first to volunteer for overseas duty, which had led him to be at this time, in this place, coming over the lip of a hill with a few of his men to find himself atop a tiny plateau.

Minute by minute, for Bean, and for the soldiers in the Second Wave of tows, the eastern horizon continues to lighten ever so slowly until, as the official correspondent describes it, there appears ‘a brightening sky and a silken, lemon-coloured dawn breaking smooth grey behind the hills'.
⁶⁹
Strangely, those hills look a lot higher than he imagined from the briefing he had been given, but perhaps that is just the early-morning light playing tricks.

At the northern end of the cove, higher up, above the Anzacs on Plugge's Plateau, Captain Faik has wasted no time in ordering his men to ‘
Ateş!
– Fire!'

Having now betrayed their positions, Captain Faik and his soldiers come under heavy fire themselves from one of the steamboats, clearly aiming at the flashes of the Turkish rifles. Still, most of the Turkish soldiers are able to keep firing, and certainly some of the invaders appear to be falling, but whether that is because they are shot or are taking cover is impossible to tell. What is certain to the Turks – ‘Help us, Allah!' – is that their fire is in no way slowing the boats, or the men, who are landing in even greater force. And the
Ingiliz
soldiers are now climbing towards them.

Across the Peninsula, the word is getting out. Although the Turkish soldiers in these parts have grown used to the sound of artillery fire coming from the Straits, this is different for those stationed on the eastern side of the Peninsula. This time, the firing is not from the direction of the Straits at all. It is coming from the west, from the direction of Gaba Tepe. And it sounds heavy.

Despite his exhaustion, the noise wakes the astute Lieutenant-Colonel Şefik, Commander of the 27th Battalion headquartered at Maidos, who has only been asleep for what feels like a millisecond. Alarmed, he leaps from his sleeping mat and gets on the telephone. Reaching the division's switchboard, he is put through to the communication post at Gaba Tepe. ‘Is the sound of artillery fire coming from your side? What is going on over there? Is something the matter?'

‘The enemy is landing troops at Ari Burnu.'

‘Any threat to Gaba Tepe?'

‘No. Nothing so far.'
⁷⁰

After hanging up, Lieutenant-Colonel Şefik immediately gives orders to his Battalion Commanders and the Commander of his machine-gun company: ‘Assemble your men, call them to arms. They are to carry only combat gear. Have them distribute the men's bread rations, and hang feed bags on the animals. When everything is ready, report back to me.'
⁷¹

Within minutes, a camp that had been all but fast asleep is a flurry of furious activity as the battle cry is sounded.

To arms!

To arms!

4.30 AM, 25 APRIL 1915, NUDGING 'NEATH THE NARROWS

In
AE2
, all has fallen near as silent as the grave, bar one thing …

As the submarine makes its way through a veritable forest of mooring wires for the deadly mines above, it starts to scrape against them, making the most unearthly screeching of metal on metal. The obvious risk is that, should a wire get caught, it will very quickly drag the mine down to the submarine, where it will instantly explode.

All the men can do, however, is keep going … their hearts in their mouths … prayers on their lips … as they call upon the heavens to allow them to
make it through.

As to where exactly they are headed, that is a very good question. It is now infeasible to rise up to periscope level, as they would almost certainly hit a mine, so all they can do is proceed blind and …

And what is
that
?

Something is bumping along the side of their submarine! It starts for'ard on the port side and keeps regularly banging all the way along the side of the sub. No one speaks, for there is nothing to say, with each small bang risking a big BANG.

And then there is another bang, on the starboard side.

‘For several minutes,' Stoker would later recount, ‘we all listened to it in uneasy silence before it broke away, tapped along the side, and followed the rest of our enemies astern.'
²

They're
still
alive.

4.35 AM, 25 APRIL 1915, ABOVE THE LANDING SITE, UPWARD EVER UPWARDS

As Beevor and his Little Lambs continue their silent climb, they are given what Beevor calls in his diary their first ‘sample of the ingenuity of the Turkish Sniper in camouflaging himself'.
³
A number of those snipers, it seems, have planted themselves in Turk-sized holes that reach just up to their armpits, leaving their shoulders and arms free. ‘To their bodies, back and front, were lashed branches of the local scrub, as well as to their arms. This did not prevent them from using their rifles freely.'
⁴

When one of them takes a pot shot at Major Beevor, and misses, one of the Australian soldiers trots over to where he has seen the spurt of flame and has a ‘good look at Friend Turk who is pretending to be a bush as hard as he can'.
⁵
Instantly, the Australian switches grips on his rifle, turns it into a club and then brings it down so hard on the Turk's head that his rifle butt breaks clean off, and blood momentarily spurts from the soldier's head just before he dies with a snapped neck.
⁶

Beevor's Little Lamb has just done something that in civilian life would have sickened him, seen him arrested and made him an out-cast. But now – in this strange state of warfare – he feels satisfied, and quickly resumes his place in the line, a hero to his comrades.

After walking just a few minutes more, another soldier rushes over to Major Beevor and says quietly, ‘I say, Sir, there's a bloody Bull Ant biting my leg, may I stop and pull him out?'

Sir agrees, and the soldier grounds his rifle, unbuckles his belt and shoves his hand down his trouser leg. In an instant, a nigh-beatific smile breaks out. ‘I say, you fellows,' he calls in a voice hoarse with excitement, ‘I've got a bullet through my leg.'

Positively delighted, he buckles up his belt and starts to hop along with his company. The
thrill
of it!

5 AM, 25 APRIL 1915, OFF CAPE HELLES, A BEHEMOTH GLIDES FORTH

On the bridge of
Queen Elizabeth
, moving north from Cape Helles towards the spot where the Australians have landed, officers whisper to each other so that the tinny voices coming up the brass pipes from the bowels of the warship can be properly heard. General Sir Ian Hamilton, positioned beside a notably nervous Admiral John de Robeck – for the responsibility of what they are about to do weighs heavily on him – brings his ear to the wind. They are still six miles off the spot where the 2nd Brigade are preparing to land when –
there
, can you hear it? – the rolling boom of artillery fire comes from behind them. Clearly, the bombardment of Cape Helles has begun.

General Hamilton is pleased. ‘The Turks,' he would write, ‘are putting up some fight.'
⁷

And not just at Cape Helles. For as
Queen Elizabeth
closes on Gaba Tepe, they start to see the puffs of shrapnel shells bursting over the water. And listen now, as Hamilton says, as ‘the patter of musketry came creeping out to sea; we are in for it now; the machine-guns muttered as through chattering teeth – up to our necks in it now'.
⁸

The glory of it! ‘Would we be out of it?' Hamilton will exult. ‘No; not one of us; not for five hundred years stuffed full of dullness and routine.'
⁹

By 5.35 am, the rattle of small arms seems to have lessened, and ahead those on the
Queen Elizabeth
can see boatloads of soldiers still pushing for the shore, while on the hills others are swarming upwards. ‘Even with our glasses they did not look much bigger than ants,' Hamilton says. ‘God, one would think, cannot see them at all or He would put a stop to this sort of panorama altogether. And yet, it would be a pity if He missed it; for these fellows have been worth the making. They are not charging up into this Sari Bair Range for money or by compulsion. They fight for love – all the way from the Southern Cross for love of the old country and of liberty. Wave after wave of the little ants press up and disappear. We lose sight of them the moment they lie down. Bravo! Every man on our great ship longs to be with them.'
¹⁰

As impressed as he is, for General Hamilton ‘the main battle called'.
¹¹
Admiral de Robeck has made it clear that he will take Hamilton wherever the Commander-in-Chief pleases on this oh so crucial day, and the General, of course, chooses to leave the feint and go back to the spot where he hopes the true killer blow on the enemy will be struck: Cape Helles, 13 miles to the south.

5.30 AM, 25 APRIL 1915, LANDING SPOT, CRASHING WAVES ON THE SHORE

And now here comes the Second Wave of Australians – battalions of the 2nd Brigade, the first of whom are landing on the beach. With daylight, they can see from the first that there has been a mistake in navigation. They are stunned to see a rocky outcrop staring down upon them that looks remarkably like a larger version of the Sphinx they thought they had left behind outside Cairo.

‘You want to dowse that camera,' a Victorian is firmly told by a fellow soldier, ‘because there'll be trouble [and] you'll be court-martialled.'

But the Victorian refuses as he furiously clicks away. ‘This,' he says firmly, just before they land, ‘is going to be the greatest day that Australia ever knew.'
¹²

With the sun now up, Captain Faik and the men of his company realise the full horror of what they are facing.
¹³
Before them, thousands of foreign soldiers are storming towards their shores and up their hills.

Though Faik's men fight with determination, they soon hear distant booms, and then large shells begin to rain down on their positions. It is the battleships
– Triumph, Majestic
and
Bacchante
– firing heavy broadsides, and shell after shell pounds into the hillsides where the Turks are reported to be most heavily concentrated. Every time a shell lands, huge plumes of earth, smoke, shrapnel and – very occasionally – Turks are sent skyward. Mostly, however, the shells from the ship – designed to devastate other ships and not targets in mountainous terrain – do little damage as their horizontal trajectory sends them ineffectively over the top of the trenches.

Not so the Turkish howitzers. Just as General von Sanders has planned, these shells are primed to come down from on high, with the shell cap on the nose turned clockwise to just the right degree so that each is timed to explode some 50 yards above the ground, sending shrapnel out over a wide area on the exposed beach. As the Turkish Forward Observer holds his binoculars in one hand and his field telephone in the other, he is able to direct the fire superbly to create maximum devastation, wiping out as many as ten men at a time, many times.

Charles Bean, watching from the
Minnewaska
, is entranced by these shells: ‘on the face of a small promontory aft two miles of the south of us [Gaba Tepe] is a brilliant pinpoint flash. Some seconds later a curious whizz through the air … the long drawn out whizz sinks down and down in scale. There is a flash high in the air … Then a bang and the whine of a shower of pellets sprayed as if from a watering can, the whip up of another circle of sea below and another white fluffy cloud slowly floating overhead.'

A man standing near the journalist marvels, ‘So that is shrapnel.'

Another calls out over his shoulder, ‘Look mate, they're carrying this joke too far – they're using ball ammunition'
¹⁴

The Mantelli gun, in the battery at Gaba Tepe, is firing on the southern part of the beach as well as at the steamboats with their tows approaching the shore, and the results are devastating. These boats simply sink with bubbles of red: ‘looking down at the bottom of the sea you could see a carpet of dead men'.
¹⁵
When one destroyer comes too close to the shore to unload its troops, artillery fire is directed onto it, and the warship soon has huge streaks of red falling down its grey-painted side.

Through it all, the brave seamen manning the steamboats continue to ferry their charges back and forth, despite being subjected to more fire than the soldiers, who only have to face this most vicious of barrages once. In some cases, the seamen do not have time to clear their boats of those shot on the last shuttle to shore, and the newly embarking soldiers simply have to walk over their fallen comrades – who have paid the ferryman – and even sit on and by the dead bodies.

As the soldiers land, those who have succeeded in dodging the blizzard of shrapnel on the beach start running up the gullies, where again man after man is cut down. The air is filled with the whistles and explosions of the shells, the whizz of bullets, and the screams and groans of the men in the middle of the whole mess.

And yes, some of the newly arrived soldiers are also taking their toll on the retreating Turks, but the problem is that many of these soon-to-be martyrs, instead of just doing the right thing by lying down and dying, are crawling into the six-feet-high shrubs that abound on the higher ground and, with their last breaths, becoming devastatingly effective. As all but unseen snipers, assisted by their still unwounded comrades, they exact a heavy toll on the arrivals.

There is only one way to get them out. ‘Five rounds rapid at the scrub in front,' comes the command from a subaltern.
¹⁶

And when that doesn't stop the snipers, from on high comes the next order: ‘Fix bayonets!' And chaaaaarge!

Private Basil Wilmer is there to report of ‘the satisfaction of seeing our lads beating the scrub, when about half a dozen Turks broke cover and fled, with the Australians cooee-ing and yelling after them. The enemy threw away rifles, equipment, and some even tore off their coats, and cast them off, but it was no good. Our chaps were too slick, and bayoneted them one after the other with great glee.'
¹⁷

In the middle of the throng, one huge Queenslander of the 9th Battalion, Sergeant Edwin Burne,
¹⁸
a farmer in civilian life, becomes an instant legend among his few surviving mates, and then well beyond, when he is seen to bayonet a Turkish soldier through the chest and simply pitchfork him over his shoulder like a bale of hay. ‘The Turks were higher up than we were,' he would modestly explain, ‘and I suppose that is how I was able to throw one of them over my shoulder.'
¹⁹