Gallipoli (56 page)

They are quickly followed by General Hamilton, who decides he and his senior staff would be much safer, not to mention more comfortable, on the island of Imbros rather than aboard
Arcadian
off W Beach.

Anzac Cove soon has only two battleships supporting it with artillery fire, instead of four, while Cape Helles goes from seven to four.

15 MAY 1915, GALLIPOLI, BRIDGES CROSSES TO THE OTHER SIDE

With the objectives of the landing as far away as ever, just as it is in Cape Helles after the two battles of Krithia, the question arises: what is the next step? For General Birdwood, the answer is obvious. There must be a third landing at Suvla Bay, to the north of Anzac. With this in mind, he now gives strict orders that no attacks should be made in that direction. ‘I wanted,' he would later recount, ‘to let the Turks think that we entirely ignored it.'
⁶⁸

They must focus meanwhile on holding on at Anzac Cove, and Birdwood remains impressed by the quality of his troops, and particularly the Australians, who embody, he will later exult, ‘all the finest qualities with which man is endowed … tenacity of purpose … resource and initiative … indomitable valour … inherent and ardent patriotism and love of country …'
⁶⁹

Everything, in short, bar the first blooming clue as to formality and to their own position in the lower orders of the military hierarchy. Many years later, in a BBC interview, Birdwood will tell of how on one occasion at around this time he was confronted by an Australian soldier on the beach at Anzac Cove, who asks, ‘Are you Birdie?'

‘I am.'

‘Good,' says the Digger. ‘I want to complain about inferior bloody material.'

With which, he pulls out one of the admittedly highly problematic grenades the soldiers are issued with, pulls out the pin, and to General Birdwood's horror throws it down near him just a second before it … explodes.

Shrapnel flies past his ears and even cuts his leggings! No, none of it actually draws blood, but he remains stupefied at the inconceivable thing that has just happened. And yet, before he can react, the Australian soldier beats him to it.

‘Gawd, Birdie,' says he, pushing his hat to the back of his head and putting his hands on his hips, ‘that is the first bastard that's gone off this month.'
⁷⁰

This capacity of the young Australians to speak truth to power both shocks and awes General Birdwood. He would later tell a story to some fellow Generals about the time he had been getting near a dangerous spot on the slopes of Gallipoli, where there was no protection from the whizzing bullets, and a sentry had called out to him, ‘Duck, Birdie; you'd better bloody well duck!'

‘What did you do?' the Generals, appalled at the sentry's presumption, asked.

‘What did I do?' Birdie replies. ‘Why, I bloody well ducked!'
⁷¹

Some officers, however, are simply not like that. It is a point of honour with them not to show fear, not to duck when other men duck, not to mind bullets buzzing around them like angry flies, but to demonstrate at all times as much contempt for the enemy's angry shots as they have for their own safety.

And General William Bridges is very much in this mould.

On this morning, Bridges is with Brudenell White and a medical officer, Captain Clive Thompson, heading up Monash Valley, when they come to a notably dangerous spot for snipers' bullets. A wall of sandbags provides some protection, but not enough. An officer who comes across them there tells them they must take extra care around the next corner, as, ‘I have lost five men there today.'
⁷²

For once, General Bridges appears to take heed, and – for the first time any of them can think of – actually breaks into a run to get past. At the next hotspot, near Steele's Post, the General does the same and runs around a corner.

Suddenly Brudenell White and Thompson hear a commotion. They race ahead to find soldiers kneeling over someone. It is Bridges, and blood is gushing from the middle of his right thigh, where his femoral artery has been blown open. In an instant, Captain Thompson removes his belt, pulls it around the thigh just higher than the wound and applies all his strength to stop the flow.

‘Another five heartbeats and he must have died there and then,' Brudenell White will later tell Bean.
⁷³

But even with the bleeding now stemmed, it is obvious that Bridges' survival is going to be touch and go – and they must get medical help immediately.

‘Don't have me carried down,' Bridges manages to gasp. ‘I don't want to endanger any of your stretcher-bearers.'

‘Nonsense, sir,' Thompson replies, ‘of course you've got to be carried down.'
⁷⁴

Bridges is soon in the hands of the stretcher-bearers, accompanied by the deeply shocked Brudenell White and Captain Thompson. There are no more shots fired at them, and they have the impression the Turks have spared them. ‘The Turk was a gentleman,' would become one of the gentle Brudenell White's favourite observations.
⁷⁵

Down on the beach, and then in the hospital ship, they try, they really try to save him. But with such a wound, with so few facilities and such potential for gangrene to set in – which is precisely what happens over the next two days – there is always going to be little chance.

And Bridges knows it. But there is one positive thing, despite it all. ‘Anyhow,' he says to the doctor dressing his wound, ‘… anyhow, I have commanded an Australian Division for nine months.'
⁷⁶

Three days later, aboard the hospital ship
Gascon
, heading back to Egypt, Bridges dies … only a short time after the news comes through that he has been knighted by George V.

General Birdwood's Chief of Staff, Brigadier-General Harold ‘Hooky' Walker, a British officer of the Indian Army, takes over temporary command of the Australian 1st Divvy, as it is known, until a replacement can be named.

As it happens, a change of command is in the wind in many places …

15 MAY 1915, LONDON, FISHER DRAWS A LINE IN THE SAND

Finally, Fisher can bear it no more, and on this day – the day after the heated War Council meeting – he sends Churchill a letter of resignation:

And he really would have gone, too, except that, shortly afterwards, Lloyd George runs into the grim-faced Fisher in the foyer of 10 Downing Street and is told of what he has just done.

Why on earth?

‘Our ships [on other seas],' Fisher tells him, ‘are being sunk while we have a fleet in the Dardanelles which is bigger than the German Navy. Both our Navy and Army are being bled for the benefit of the Dardanelles Expedition.'
⁷⁸

Lloyd George, of course, tries to change Fisher's mind, but all the Munitions Minister can get him to agree to is to delay making a public announcement for 48 hours, to allow the government the time it needs to organise itself to limit the political fall-out.

And Churchill, too, tries to talk him out of such drastic action, writing him a soothing note. But Sir John Fisher is over the whole thing, and Churchill in particular, and writes in his reply letter:

And go he does.

15 MAY 1915, AUSTRALIA, SOME MORE REPORTS, WITH BAYONETS FLASHING

It has taken a long time to pass the censors, but at last, on this day, the report of the landing by the official war correspondent Charles E. W. Bean is published in
The Sydney Morning Herald
, and around the country. It confirms the heroism already recorded by Ashmead-Bartlett and is devoured across Australia, again, not least by Keith Murdoch:

True, the prose is not quite as florid as that of Ashmead-Bartlett's account, but that is simply the nature of the man.

‘Bean!' the English journalist would note of his Australian contemporary's far more factual style. ‘O, I think Bean actually counts the bullets.'
⁸¹

EVENING, 17 MAY 1915, ANZAC COVE, ANZACS FEELING UNDERMINED

Quinn's Post is holding on, but only just.

‘Quinn's looked the most desolate spot on earth,' Bean would record, no doubt while counting bullets. ‘Not a blade of green is left there, the place is scorched to the bone, the pink and brown earth lies bare, tumbled this way and that with trenches – with the desolation of a deserted mining camp.'
⁸²
No mining camp, however,
ever
saw this many explosions, as Quinn's continues to be blasted by artillery and bombs, causing variously plumes of dust, rivers of blood, small white bomb-clouds hanging low like mist or ‘an ugly black puff going straight up, like that of a railway engine'. If it is a really big bomb, Bean notes, it sometimes emits black smoke ‘like that of a small volcano. These explosions often lifted the earth, red, yellow or black, in dense little clouds – shot fragments of wood, cloth, earth, ten or twenty feet into the air … An intermittent stream of wounded came out, some with frightful wounds.'
⁸³

Something
is
going on. While up there a few days back, before being relieved by the Light Horse, Private Joseph Slack of Australia's 15th Battalion was one of many who had been sure of it. For well over a week now, there have been rumours that the Turks are digging tunnels towards Quinn's – perhaps to put a bomb under them and blow them out of their position – and the rumours have been so persistent among the Anzacs that New Zealand engineers have worked to sink three shafts some 15 feet deep so that men can go down there and
listen
for the sound of any tunnelling coming towards them.

The 15th and 16th Australian Battalions contain men with considerable mining experience, from places such as Charters Towers and Mount Morgan in Queensland, and the goldfields of South Australia and Western Australia. They are disinclined to depend on others for evidence on which their lives depend, so they carry out their own investigations.

Lying on his stomach this night, in an extension of a small trench adjoining his own, soldier Slack can hear exactly that. There it is again, ‘the steady, persistent, muffled knocking of the enemy's picks'.
⁸⁴

Slack calls for his Sergeant-Major, who also hears it, as does his Company Commander, and many men of his company. These men are in no doubt: ‘Jacko is getting under us.'
⁸⁵

And yet what can they do?

Seemingly, very little.

18 MAY 1915, ANZAC COVE, ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

Something is wrong, and Ellis Silas knows it. Two days earlier, he had written in his diary,
I think if I am here much longer my reason will go – I do not seem able to get a grip of myself and feel utterly crushed and unmanned
,
⁸⁶
and it has only got worse since. He cannot concentrate, has no desire to eat, is on the point of tears all the time, and his greatest fear is that in the heat of battle he will
bungle a message and perhaps cause the loss of the lives of many of these brave fellows
.
⁸⁷

He has hoped to get wounded, to take his own feelings out of the equation, but, extraordinarily, it has not happened. And last night he had gone ‘quite off my head'. Clearly his nerves are shattered, and his Commanding Officer, backed by the medical officer, insists that he must be evacuated to have a complete rest. There is no resentment. Colonel Pope tells him he is sorry to see him go, as ‘you have done some valuable work for us', while Captain Eliezer Margolin says, ‘Yes, Silas, old chap, it's about time too, you're not cut out for this kind of thing. I hope you will get into the [Army Medical Corps] as you always wanted to do.'
⁸⁸

And with that, Silas is withdrawn, making his way from the frontlines on a route that used to be just a dusty track exposed to snipers but is now magically transformed into a road up to 12 feet deep, constructed over the last fortnight or so. It takes him to the clearing station, from where he is put on a hospital ship to take him back to Cairo. He is still compos mentis enough to help as an orderly on the ship, trying to keep the seriously wounded alive long enough to get to a hospital. And yet, upon his arrival at that hospital, he collapses completely, wandering into a delirium where he again imagines himself to be signalling in the horrors of Gallipoli …