Gallipoli (68 page)

‘They now knew,' Bean would record, ‘that for them the prospect was one of battle after battle, in which, in the long run, there must almost certainly be one of two endings. They felt themselves penned between two long blank walls reaching perpetually ahead of them, from which there was no turning and no escape, save that of death or of such wounds as would render them useless for further service.'
¹⁶

Battalion Commanders must be on the lookout for such cases – a wound to the left hand or left foot always being the most suspicious – and gather evidence so the soldiers who do it can be court-martialled.

And yet, for all the growing weakness of the Anzacs, it may be they are stronger in body and in spirit than their counterparts at Cape Helles. That, at least, is the impression of the Secretary of the Dardanelles Committee, Lieutenant-Colonel Maurice Hankey, sent by that Committee on a fact-finding mission.

Though General Hamilton has not seen a lot of him, Hankey has shown the General the copy of a personal cable he has sent to Lord Kitchener, where he has reported after his visit to Anzac, ‘Australians are superbly confident and spoiling for a fight.'
¹⁷

The Turks?

Well, from the ANZAC side of the trenches, there are clear signs that they, too, must be struggling, most particularly as it is noted that they ‘occasionally held their hands above the parapet to be shot at',
¹⁸
presumably in order to be evacuated themselves. But there are other signs that, like the Anzacs, their spirit remains strong …

On one occasion, as detailed by Charles Bean, the Turks put a new spin on an old game that the two sides play daily. This version starts the same, with the Turks putting up a mock tin periscope, to draw useless Anzac fire. Once it is shot away, up comes one obviously made of cardboard. ‘[Our men] fired at it and missed,' Bean would recount. ‘Someone else fired and missed again. Every time they missed the cardboard gave a little confident shake as a duck waggles its tail. The Turk in the trench was signalling a miss.'

At last, though, it is shot away, and the Anzacs wait to see what he will put up this time. It proves – and here's the innovation – to be ‘a bit of shining tin this time … cut in the shape of a cross. Everybody knew what this ally of Germany meant by that, this Turk with the German officers in command and the German money at his back – it was a jeer at our religion and the religion of Germany; and the joke ceased at that instant as if it had been cut short by a chopper.'
¹⁹

How
dare
he?

24 JULY 1915, ELLIS ASHMEAD-BARTLETT'S BLOOD BOILS

Is it sedition – ‘conduct encouraging insurrection against the established order' – or not? It just might be, but Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett and his officer friends can barely help themselves.

After the correspondent spends a morning at Anzac Beach with his newly purchased cinematograph – capturing moving pictures of over 20 bathing soldiers being killed or wounded by shrapnel, 15 by just one shell – he returns to Imbros, where he dines with Lieutenant-Colonel Aubrey H. Herbert and, most pertinently, Colonel Leslie Wilson, an extremely well-connected Member of Parliament with the Conservative Party, who tells tale after tale of ‘muddle, mismanagement and useless slaughter'.
²⁰

Other officers might feel the need to mute their criticisms of the Generals, but Wilson is too senior himself to care. On one recent occasion, he had been ordered to take a trench of such little consequence that he had vigorously protested, further pointing out that even if they captured it, it would prove impossible to hold. ‘Time and time again I protested,' he tells his appalled dining companions, ‘but finally received a definite order which had to be obeyed. We took it without much trouble and then got bombed out, exactly as I had predicted, losing three good officers and eighty men. Finally, I retired with only six survivors.'
²¹

What follows is even more appalling, and hideously wasteful of British lives, as General Hunter-Weston – now known as ‘the Giggling Butcher' to troops and officers alike – had then ordered a Marine battalion to take the same trench, only for exactly the same catastrophe to befall them! The whole thing had been entirely consistent with the daily shemozzle Wilson had experienced since arriving here. ‘The orders issued to the 29th Division are seldom intelligible,' he declares, ‘and always had to be changed, modified, or ignored. We can never get a definite objective for an attack, as the orders always end up with “Go as far as you can and then entrench”.'
²²

Colonel Wilson's opinions of Hunter-Weston marry strongly with Ashmead-Bartlett's own passionately held views. ‘After my first conversations with him,' Ashmead-Bartlett would later recount, ‘he seemed to me not to have the smallest knowledge of war and to throw away many lives in the most wicked and reckless manner without having any clear idea in his mind of any objective.'
²³

Yes, there is the small mercy that, just in the last week, Hunter-Weston had gone back to England – whether sick from sunstroke, sacked or suffering some kind of breakdown like Carden is not known, though on her hospital ship Nurse Lydia King refers to him as a ‘crotchety old man'
²⁴
– but that is no solace for those thousands of men who now lie in their graves because of him. The problem is that Hamilton and his HQ staff still remain. Everywhere these men go, the diners on Imbros agree, there is never a good word said for any of them, and Sir Ian is criticised ‘because he never visits the front-lines'.
²⁵

And what frustrates the English correspondent more than anything is that he cannot write the truth of the matter, as it will be instantly censored. ‘I thought there were limits to human stupidity but now I know there are none,' he had confided to his diary the week before. ‘The censorship has now passed beyond all reason.'
²⁶

Truly, he tells his companions, it does not matter how mild one's views, the censors will knock it out. There are
four
of them. And even the mild reports that do get through are delayed more than ever, Ashmead-Bartlett suspects, so that the words of Sir Ian Hamilton – who has now taken to writing
his own
despatches, which contain the most ghastly lies – are released well before the correspondent's reports.

In his last missive, Sir Ian had announced to the world that 5150 Turks had been killed and 15,000 wounded. How could he possibly know that?

Exactly! Ashmead-Bartlett's own estimate is about 40 per cent of that.

In the course of the conversation, Aubrey Herbert makes what Ellis judges to be ‘the most serious of all' charges against him, that General Hamilton routinely leaves ‘thousands of our wounded to perish in front of the lines after these attacks have failed instead of arranging for an armistice'.

The truth is that the British Generals aren't even close enough to negotiate an armistice with the eager Turks to gather in the wounded. For they are mostly on Imbros, where they ‘have their dinners and their baths and apparently it never interferes with their night's rest the knowledge that hundreds of their fellow men are lying mutilated and unattended only a few yards away from our front lines crying for water suffering the agonies of the damned and knowing that their fate is a long slow lingering death from suppurating wounds or from thirst and starvation'.
²⁷

And yet still the fresh divisions continue to arrive from Great Britain, many of them in recent days. Well, the English journalist views them with nothing less than pity. Yes, back in London, he had rallied for more men to be sent, but that had been on the understanding they should land at Bulair – and now these Generals have swooped on the idea of new recruits to plan yet another slaughter. ‘The sending of the 13th Division to Helles,' he had written in his diary, ‘makes it look as if they intended that Achi Baba shall eat up this Division as well as so many others. The appetite of this mountain is insatiable.'
²⁸

The more Ashmead-Bartlett contemplates these fresh plans for useless slaughter, the more appalled he is: ‘Thus we carry on at this hopeless game, ignoring all the strategical possibilities in the situation by persisting in these murderous frontal attacks on impregnable positions, losing tens of thousands of our best and bravest men without achieving any result or carrying us any nearer to our goal.'
²⁹

Well, it is clear to Ashmead-Bartlett and these senior officers. As a matter of urgency, Hamilton must be replaced and with him the entire cabal of incompetent senior officers around him, led by the execrable Braithwaite. If this is sedition, so be it.

LATE JULY 1915, THE WORD COMES THROUGH

At last!

For both Colonel Brazier and Lieutenant Throssell, it is the news they have long been waiting for. After months of waiting, of festering, they and 80 reinforcements from the 10th Light Horse are to go to Gallipoli, to rejoin the main body of the Regiment. With a song in their hearts, their eyes on the prize –
Gallipoli!
– they catch the train to Alexandria and are soon on the blue waters of the Mediterranean, heading north.

LATE JULY 1915, THE HEIGHTS OF ANZAC, NOT THE WAY WE DO IT IN FRANCE, OLD BOY

And here now is General Sir Frederick Stopford, the Commander of the three freshly arrived divisions of the IXth Corps, 61 years old and in poor health, come to survey for the first time the shores upon which his forces must shortly storm.

Despite a military career stretching back to the Grenadier Guards in 1871, the Egyptian and Sudan campaigns in the 1880s and the Ashanti Campaign of 1895, before rising to the lofty position of commanding the first home-defence army, he has never actually led men in battle.

Never mind.

On this hot morning, it is at Stopford's specific request that Birdwood takes him to the northern heights of Anzac Cove, from where he can best survey it. He needs to know just what his soldiers will be facing on first landing in terms of both natural and Turkish defences. The old man – and he looks old, make no mistake – surveys the scene for over a minute before giving his preliminary verdict. ‘I like this,' he says, ‘better than I thought I should.'

‘Of course you do,' General Birdwood replies, ‘and if you will take my advice I feel confident you will get right through. There are no continuous trenches – only short lengths. If you will land on a broad front, with every unit going forward at once, you will turn every existing trench. On the whole of that front we think there are no more than 1,000 men of the Turkish Gendarmerie. Land, as I did, just before dawn. The moon will be just right, and the men can't lose their way.'

At first, Stopford seems keen on this proposal, but then offers, ‘My men have done no night work.'

‘Nor had mine – and you have a week before you to practise them on the islands, where there is country very similar to this. Give them plenty of night practice, and make sure every officer knows his objective, and you can't fail!'
³⁰

‘What about the preliminary bombardment?' one of Stopford's Brigadier-Generals, Hamilton Reed, VC, asks. ‘We never attack without it in France.'

‘In France, yes – but here, no. What have you to bombard? Your one great chance of success lies in surprise, which any bombardment would destroy.'
³¹

Reed looks far from convinced. That is
not
the way they do it in France.

Having been briefed by General Hamilton on his desires, Birdwood tries to impress upon these senior officers the need to push quickly inland once the landing is done and secure the ridges – as the Turks will be certain to move their forces there quickly, just as had happened at Cape Helles and Anzac Cove – but they don't seem particularly convinced of that, either.

Hopefully it will all work out.

EARLY AUGUST 1915, ABOVE ANZAC COVE, SUSPICIONS ARE RAISED

Colonel Şefik, the 27th Regiment's Commander, is one of the first to notice it. Having been at the frontline since day one, he is well equipped to notice changes to the enemy's rhythms, and never has he seen activity like this. There is such an increase in traffic in Anzac Cove, with ever more men and munitions coming and going – but mostly coming – that it is ever more obvious the enemy is planning some kind of imminent major attack.

General Liman von Sanders for one is not surprised, having received a report a fortnight earlier that ‘spoke of the concentration of 50,000 to 60,000 men on the island of Lemnos alone and gave the number of warships and transport vessels there as 140'.
³²

This had been followed up on 22 July with an even starker warning from German Field Army Headquarters: ‘From reports received here it is probable that at the beginning of August a strong attack will be made on the Dardanelles, perhaps in connection with a landing in the Gulf of Saros or on the coast of Asia Minor. It will be well to economize ammunition.'
³³

Von Sanders tells all of his commanders on the Peninsula to ‘be vigilant and ready to fight at any moment, above all, after midnight and at dawn'.
³⁴
As to exactly where the enemy will strike, rumours swirl, and von Sanders and his senior officers shuffle their units accordingly, massing their troops, many newly arrived, at the spots where the invaders are most likely to try to break through or attempt a new landing. Structural defences are improved, including placing ever more heavy logs over the forward trenches, covered by a thick layer of dirt, as protection against a barrage – of course leaving loopholes in the parapets so the soldiers can continue to fire at the enemy trenches.