Gallipoli (65 page)

Ashmead-Bartlett is stupefied. ‘Any such move is out of the question until Gaba Tepe is taken to allow the Australian right to push forward,' he replies, trying to hide his amazement at the sheer, numbing ignorance of the question, ‘and it would also be necessary for our left flank at Helles to advance considerably.'
⁴⁹

‘But why did they give up Gaba Tepe?' Kitchener asks.

‘They never held it.'
⁵⁰
Can this be
possible
? After six weeks of reports from the Dardanelles, most of them from General Hamilton, Kitchener clearly does not have the first clue about key aspects of the campaign.

‘To avoid the difficulties of the Bulair landing,' Lord Kitchener goes on, ‘is there no other point between Anzac and Bulair where we might get across?'
⁵¹

‘I have never heard any other spoken of,' Ashmead-Bartlett replies, ‘except, of course, Suvla Bay …'
⁵²

MID-JUNE 1915, EASTERN ANATOLIA, LIKE JACKALS ON RABBITS

It is the tramp of the dead. As the Ottoman Empire's war on those who would attack it externally continues, so too does it continue to destroy those it perceives as its internal enemies, most particularly the Armenians. On the orders of Talaat, not just leaders but now mere members of the Armenian community are led away, never to be seen again.

On this day, some 25,000 of them have been expelled from their town of Erzincan and marched to the south, to a destination unknown. All they are told is they can take with them only what they can carry.

In the middle of one grief-stricken group tramping along, escorted by gendarmes holding guns, and some soldiers, is an 18-year-old youth, Soghomon Tehlirian. When the war had begun, he had been studying engineering at the German University in Constantinople, only to be first conscripted into the army and then expelled back to the family home he has now been expelled
from
. As he plods forward with his crying mother, two sisters and brother, there would seem to be no worse hell than this, and they can only hope that the father of the family, who has been taken away, is still alive … when it happens.

Suddenly the gendarmes turn their guns on them and start robbing them, soon joined by a mob of Turks. One of his sisters is pulled down and raped, and after his mother cries ‘May I go blind!'
⁵³
she is shot dead before him, even as his other sister is also raped. All is madness and mayhem, screams and grunting. When his brother tries to help his sister, a soldier cleaves his head open with an axe. Tehlirian rushes forward, only to be smashed in the side of the head himself. Much later, he comes to consciousness in the darkness, beneath the body of his brother and surrounded by the bodies of everyone else in the group, including his family. The corpse of his mother is lying face-down, just a little way away. He has been left for dead.

Even in Gallipoli, something of such atrocities is heard of by the Anzacs, with Percival Fenwick noting in his diary, ‘[General] Enver paid a hurried visit to Anzac, and advised the Turks to blow our trenches up. He then hurried back to Constantinople and, we are told, shot a lot of Armenians, as he could not shoot Australians. There must be some excitement in being Head Man in Turkey. One can shoot anyone you happen to dislike.'
⁵⁴

MID-JUNE 1915, ANZAC COVE, BEAN'S FULL OF 'EM

All right for some. While Ashmead-Bartlett is swanning around London and the like, Charles Bean continues to count bullets and gather the information he needs for both his articles and the Official History. ‘I was sniped at twice today looking over the parapets,' he faithfully records in his diary,
⁵⁵
adding to his bullet tally.

When not wandering the trenches, or fighting the flies in his tent, or racing to the latrines to outrun the inevitable results of having a bad case of the ‘Gallipoli Gallop', Bean is also working on a project called ‘Dinkum Oil', a new trench newspaper that has won wide acclaim and popularity after just one issue:

Bean is also thrilled to receive a couple of letters from his brother, Jack,
⁵⁸
now recovering in Alexandria, dated over a month before. It is crazy, and deeply frustrating, how long it takes for mail to arrive – and it is the cause of widespread angst at Anzac Cove.

Charles Bean gets back to work, sorting through his notes and trying to understand the whole situation as completely as he can. It is not as if, however, he and even the troops themselves don't get some respite. For now that summer has hit and there is torpor in the air, even the Mohammedans on the other side sometimes take a break from mounting attacks, and occasionally things fall so quiet that all you can hear is the endless buzzing of flies.

The most interesting activity for the Anzacs is swimming in the Aegean Sea, and one Sunday morning at this time, Charles Bean counts no fewer than 404 men bathing, while there are a lot more than that just quietly sitting on the beach half-dressed and basking in the sun, enjoying the tiny let-offs from being in the frontlines or doing fatigue duty. By now, a lot of them, he notes, as Monash had, ‘are much darker than the Turks'.
⁵⁹

For all that, there is still a great deal of risk, as inevitably the Turks start to fire shots and shells at the distant bathers now so tightly packed in the waters. Back home, on sunny Australian beaches, the call would often go up, ‘'Ware shark!' Here, it is, ‘'Ware shell!'
⁶⁰

Bean is down at the shore a couple of days later when a shell explodes and a man emerges from the water with his arm hanging by a thread. He wears a stunned expression, not screaming or shouting, but simply holding the near severed arm with his other hand.

In a similar situation in, say, Bondi, with a man emerging from the sea from a shark attack, the waters would have been instantly cleared. But this is Gallipoli. Everything is different here. So he lost his arm, so what? They all see worse on a daily basis, and as there is nowhere on Anzac Cove that is free from the shells, they may as well be here as anywhere. So, yes, a few blokes get out of the water after this fellow loses his arm, but not everyone, and there is no panic. Some men swim further out than Bean has seen before, and watch, uninterested, as ‘machine-gun bullets … drop into the water between them and the shore'. One officer, Major Henry Tiddy, finds the scene slightly amusing, noting in his diary one day after the beach had been shelled yet again, ‘fun of the world to see hundreds of naked men making for cover'.
⁶¹

And so the men continue to swim, day by day – even initiating some Turkish prisoners into the joys of surf-bathing – all of it with the full support of General Birdwood, who often has a dip himself. Yes, he is urged to stop the men bathing, but he refuses outright. ‘I felt,' he later explained, ‘that their spirits would suffer if, in all that heat, they could never get a wash, and I myself was bound to admit that I would rather be knocked out clean than live dirty!'
⁶²

In fact, Birdie is garnering a lot of respect from the Anzacs, for his continued presence on the frontlines. As a young private writes home to his family, ‘General Birdwood was round here the other day. He is a cheery smart little man with a pleasant word for everyone. “Well, lad,” he said, “have you shot any Turks this morning?” Of course saluting is all done away with.'
⁶³

And, despite his rocky start with the men, so too is Charles Bean! As one soldier writes home of the man once thought widely to be little more than a prudish wowser, ‘He may have made mistakes but he is quite the most conscientious man on Gallipoli. Lots of the war correspondents are getting their tales from the hospitals but Bean is up on the firing line all the time.'
⁶⁴

Detail from ‘Bathing under Shell Fire', by Ellis Silas (AWM ART90795)

18 JUNE 1915, BATTLESHIP HILL, READING THE LIE OF THE LAND

Another man who has not left the frontlines since the beginning is the newly promoted
Colonel
Mustafa Kemal. Exhausted, with the sparkle in his blue eyes now turned a dull grey, he stands atop Battleship Hill on this hot afternoon, gazing over the rough and rugged terrain of the Peninsula, from Suvla Bay, just out of sight to the north, down towards Cape Helles in the south. He is ruminating on the growing tension he is experiencing with the Commander of the Northern Group, General Esat, who is just about to arrive with his Chief of Staff, Colonel Fahrettin.