Gallipoli (62 page)

Though the jam-tin bomb is considered something of a joke at first, it is soon obvious the Turks don't find it funny at all, as many of their soldiers are killed and maimed. The Anzacs start to take the device more seriously.

The factory, which at one point keeps 54 soldiers busy, is soon producing 200 bombs a day. In fact, it is so successful that up at Pope's the Diggers again improvise and build a massive catapult, with arms, as one Digger would describe it, ‘six feet high, shaped like a “V” and the arms had very strong elastic and it was wound back by a winch and had a leather sack at the end in which one of our jam tin bombs was put in'.
⁹⁷

That thing could hurl bombs so far that you had no idea who they hurt or maimed, but gee it could be fun to send them hurtling in all directions. The Turks or bombs, do I mean? Both.

The Turkish bombs are exclusively thrown by hand. About the size and shape of a cricket ball – and so called ‘cricket ball bombs' by the Diggers – their fuses come out the top, and the Turks are able to light them simply by rubbing the fuses on their trousers or on some phosphorus pinned to their tunics.
⁹⁸

In truth, it is extraordinary how blasé both sides could get, hurling such things back and forth, with Trooper Bluegum noting that before throwing their own grenades or bombs, the Diggers would often cry, ‘Are you there, Abdul? Well, here's
baksheesh
.' Or maybe, ‘Here you are, Mohammed, here's a Christmas box.'
⁹⁹

And when a Turkish grenade would come back in reply, or even to open their own innings, the Australians would nod sagely in the manner of vendors in ‘Gyppo' markets and say, ‘
Maleesch
', or ‘Ver' good, ver' nice …'
¹⁰⁰

On a good day, they can love it. On a bad day, they die.

Apart from devising bomb contraptions and attending to the relentless chores attendant to the upkeep, watering, feeding and cleaning of thousands and thousands of men, the Diggers in Monash Valley and all over the Peninsula are trying to carve out and cosy up their bivouacs so they have a place to call home. As Colonel Monash notes, ‘The allusion is to the wonderful sticking properties of this Corps. The Turks have been trying to scrape us off for over four weeks, but we still stick fast.'
¹⁰¹
They live in noisy, crowded – and increasingly filthy – conditions and under the constant hail of fire. A man needs, after all, a small patch to lay his slouch hat and call his own.

Colonel Monash himself writes, ‘We manage to make ourselves fairly comfortable in our bivouacs. My home is a hole in the side of the hill, about 6' x 7' and 4' deep. The sides are built up with sandbags and the roof consists of three Water Proof sheets lashed together. Biscuit boxes serve as tables, chairs, cupboards and other furniture. I have my valise to sleep on, and get a daily bath out of a canvas bucket with a sponge; and at rarer intervals a dip in the sea …'
¹⁰²

But he, Brigade Commander no less, is of course staying in the royal suite of dugouts, and most men survive in even smaller and far more rudimentary hovels. One man later writes home, ‘I have laid out my bed, 1 oilsheet, 2 blankets and an overcoat for a pillow. I haven't many oil paintings on the wall, but I'll tell you what is there. First a dirty towel – dinkum dirty – none of your half and half business about it, then a Haversack containing two razors, 3 toothbrushes (toothpaste – nil, use salt instead, a “housewife” I think they call it, but it's certainly not the kind of housewife I sometimes dream of …), a hairbrush … tin of dog, packet of biscuits … Above my head like a beautiful chandelier hang a pair of boots …'
¹⁰³

It may not be much, but for the Diggers who have been here a month now with scant news from their loved ones fretting in their true home of homes, this little patch is their castle.

EVENING TO EARLY MORNING, 26–27 MAY 1915, BOTTOMS UP

There is trouble brewing, and Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett knows it.

With the sinking of
Triumph
the day before, everyone is on edge – and for good reason. If a German submarine can sink such a battleship, it can likely bring ruin to
any
ship, and in all likelihood it will be Ashmead-Bartlett's own HMS
Majestic
, anchored 500 yards off W Beach at Cape Helles.

It is for this reason that he decides to do two things on this evening. The first is to help the captain drain the ship of the last of its champagne reserves – it is better that they, rather than the fish, drink it – and the second is to sleep on the deck that night, on a comfortable mattress he has had brought up from below.

Ashmead-Bartlett wakes suddenly at sun-up the following morning. Something is just not right.

‘What time is it?' he asks the sentry nearest him on the deck of
Majestic
.

‘Six-fifteen, sir,' the sentry replies.

Harrumph
. That is way too early for a gentleman of the press to be awake, so he goes back to sleep.

Twenty-five minutes later, however, England's finest war correspondent is awoken by heavy, running footsteps – on his chest, among other things.

‘What's the matter?' he calls after the departing figure.

‘There's a torpedo coming!'
¹⁰⁴

So he had been right.

With a massive
whump
, the torpedo hits
Majestic
on the port side, and the ship all but immediately starts to list in that direction.

It obviously does not have long to stay afloat.

‘Then,' Ashmead-Bartlett would later write, ‘there came a sound as if the contents of every pantry in the world had fallen at the same moment, a clattering such as I had never heard, as everything loose in her tumbled about.'
¹⁰⁵

Ashmead-Bartlett is not shocked, despite
Majestic
threatening to turn turtle at any moment. More than anything, he admires his own prescience at suspecting this was going to happen all along. Still a little hung-over from all the champagne so wisely consumed the night before, he now hangs over the side and soon drops down, bouncing off a part of the failed torpedo net and into the water. Within minutes, he is able to swim with many of the other sailors to clamber aboard one of the many boats that have been sent to their aid.

The journalist is mercifully clear when – in full view of thousands of cheering Turks in the hills and shocked Allied soldiers on the toe of Cape Helles –
Majestic
gives up the ghost. With a final shake of her upturned stern, she heads to the bottom of the Aegean Sea, taking 40 souls with her.

The
Majestic
is the third Allied ship sunk in the Dardanelles in the past two weeks.

Within a day, Ashmead-Bartlett is heading to London to have a quick break and replace all the wardrobe and writing materials that he has lost in the sunken ship. Still a little shocked by his narrow escape the day before, he steals the biggest lifebelt he can find from
Fovette
, and, clutching it tightly as his only piece of luggage, heads up the gangplank of the cargo ship
Baron Ardrossan
, which is to depart shortly.

‘What are you carrying that belt for?' the captain asks wryly.

‘So I don't sink to the bottom of the Mediterranean if we get hit,' the journalist explains.

‘Don't you worry about it,' the captain says, waving a dismissive hand. ‘I've got eleven hundred rounds of 12-inch ammunition on board as ballast, and if anything strikes us we shall go up so high that the only thing which could help you would be an aeroplane.'
¹⁰⁶

With a sigh, Ashmead-Bartlett abandons the belt and makes his way to his quarters.

Commodore Roger Keyes, for one, is not sorry to see him go. ‘He is a most unpleasant person,' Keyes writes to his wife, ‘but an able writer. All his reports go through me, and they are accurate, but he takes a most pessimistic view and has tried to send two or three impossible telegrams which we and GHQ stopped.'

Though Ashmead-Bartlett has gone, Keyes has ensured that others will ‘strictly censor his stuff'. Yes, even in London, ‘he won't be allowed to publish anything about the Dardanelles uncensored'.
¹⁰⁷

In the wake of the twin sinkings, Admiral de Robeck institutes quick measures to prevent another disaster, including removing the last of the big battleships and supply ships from the Dardanelles. The former will now only return to provide artillery cover for special operations and will be meantime based in Mudros, protected from submarines by a boom across the harbour entrance. So too the supply ships. From now on, their supplies must be placed on smaller, insignificant ships in Mudros and sent to Anzac Cove and Cape Helles from there, those crafts making trips of 60 miles instead of the previous 3000 yards.

For his part, de Robeck now bases himself on the yacht
Triad
, something so small that surely no sub would bother to torpedo it.

‘What a change since the War Office sent us packing with a bagful of hallucinations,' Hamilton soon writes morosely in his diary. ‘Naval guns sweeping the Turks off the Peninsula; the Ottoman Army legging it from a British submarine waving the Union Jack; Russian help in hand; Greek help on the
tapis
. Now it is our Fleet which has to leg it from the German submarine; there is no ammunition for the guns; no drafts to keep my Divisions up to strength …'
¹⁰⁸

Things are grim and getting grimmer.

In the absence of the big ships, all that is left are light cruisers and destroyers. What had started as a joint operation now appears to be army alone. It is hard not to feel abandoned.

As General Birdwood would later recall, ‘Not one of us failed to realise how absolutely dependent on the Navy we were, day and night, for everything. Our many landings, our covering-fire, supplies – for all these the Navy was indeed, as an Indian would say, “Mah-Bap”, or our mother and father.'
¹⁰⁹

28 MAY 1915, IMBROS, BACK TO FRONT

It had been a close-run thing. The howitzer shell that had landed just a few yards from Captain Carter nearly killed him. Luckily, however, it had fallen into the soft earth of the parapet, which absorbed much of its impact, and Carter had come back to consciousness with no feeling in his legs and no ability to see. A few more seconds and he realised that his legs were merely buried, and the lack of vision was caused by the smoke. His men had dug him out and the smoke had cleared. He was hurt, yes – the shell had landed so close that the right side of his face had been burned, his right ear deafened and his right leg badly bruised, while the blast had also removed much of his clothing – and he had had to be evacuated here, to the hospital at Imbros, to recover. But now, after just a few days, he feels stronger and is eager to get back to Anzac. His only regret is that in his brief time in hospital he has been unable to see, or even track down, Nurse King.

In the wee hours of the following morning, he rejoins his men back in the old trench and finds his nerves are very shaky, but after an hour or so he settles down and is even able to snatch some sleep before dawn.

‘From looks of things here,' he writes in his diary, ‘I anticipate that this job should be thru' in about a month from today.'
¹¹⁰

3.30 AM, 29 MAY 1915, ANZAC COVE, A BAD BLOW-UP

All is in readiness. After weeks of preparation, of carefully digging tunnels out from the Turkish trenches towards the Australian positions at Quinn's Post, the soldiers of Turkey's 14th Regiment have reached a spot right
under
their enemy. Despite the fact that the Anzacs have recently woken up to it, the Turkish engineers have been able to lay one of the tunnels with charges.

And now it is time. With all of the soldiers of the 14th Regiment in the frontline opposite Quinn's not only forewarned, but with their rifles and bayonets at the ready, and their front foot on the fire-step ready to launch, the Turkish captain takes the two wires in his hands and with some satisfaction slowly brings them together, gazing resolutely forward at the enemy trenches bathed in the ethereal light of the full moon.

In an instant, the ground at Quinn's simply erupts with a muffled roar from the bowels of the earth and a searing flame shoots so far skyward that the low clouds above glow red. Turkish soldiers and artillery unleash a blizzard of bullets and shrapnel on the front trench in an attempt to kill any number of the 350 men of Australia's 13th Battalion, together with 100 10th Light Horse Regiment troopers currently stationed there and not taken out by the initial blast. The Turkish soldiers charge forward, eager to capitalise on the chaos and take over the position.