Gallipoli (42 page)

Liman von Sanders had had an exasperating time during these first three days of the battle. He was at Gallipoli town on the evening of August 6 when he first heard of the
break-out from Anzac and the Suvla landing, and he seems to have appreciated very rapidly that his expectations had been wrong—that the Allies had no intention of landing either at Bulair or
in Asia, and were in fact putting their main attack into the centre of the peninsula itself. The Bulair group, consisting of the 7th and the 12th Turkish divisions under Ahmed Feizi Bey, was
standing by in reserve at the neck of the peninsula, and he ordered it to get ready to move. At the same time two of the divisions in Asia were told to come up to Chanak so that they could cross to
Gallipoli in boats. Still another division was instructed to move round to the
north of the Anzac bridgehead where the attack appeared to be growing more and more
menacing.

Feizi Bey had been ill, and he was asleep in bed when he was woken at a quarter to two in the morning on August 7 with an order to march his two divisions south with all speed to Suvla. Soon
after daylight the first battalions were on the road—they had a distance of some thirty-five miles to go—and Feizi Bey went on ahead by car to reconnoitre the position at the front.
Towards two in the afternoon he found Liman at the village of Yalova, just north of the Narrows, and a conference was held around a small table at the local police station. It was apparent by now
that a major landing had taken place at Suvla, and that Willmer with his three battalions could not be expected to hold out much longer. How long would it be before the Saros group arrived? Feizi
Bey was anxious to please and he committed the error of saying not what he knew to be true but what he believed Liman wanted to hear. The soldiers, he said, were making a double march; they would
arrive before the end of the afternoon. Liman was much surprised and pleased at this, and at once ordered that an attack should be made on Suvla at dawn on the following day.

After the conference Feizi Bey abandoned his car and set off on horseback into the hills. Sunset found him at Willmer’s headquarters on the heights above the Suvla plain, and it was there
that he learned that he had been much too optimistic: his troops were still on the road a long way to the north. However, he continued to hope that he would be able to give battle in the morning,
and he sat up all night with his staff drawing up his plans.

Before daybreak on August 8 Liman rode out towards the Suvla plain to watch the attack, and was a good deal annoyed to find that nothing whatever was happening. No soldiers had reached the
startline, and except for the British clustering around the Suvla beaches there was no sign of movement anywhere. After an hour or two a staff officer turned up and explained that there had been a
delay—the Bulair troops could not be expected
for several hours. Liman curtly ordered the attack to be put in at sunset and went off to see what was happening at
Anzac.

At 2 p.m. Feizi Bey had a conference with his staff, and they agreed that it was now too late for anything to be done that day; the men were exhausted after their long march, many had still not
arrived, and to attack across exposed ground with the setting sun shining in their eyes would mean certain disaster. The battle was put off until dawn on the following day, August 9.

Liman was extremely impatient when he heard this news. He said over the telephone that the situation had become very serious, and that it was absolutely essential that the Saros group should
attack that night. Willmer’s small forces might crack at any moment and the British would gain the heights. Feizi Bey replied he would do what he could but he was back on the telephone to
Liman again a little later. An immediate attack, he said, was quite impossible. His generals were against it and so were his staff. The men had been without sleep for two nights, they were short of
guns and supplies of every kind. They were without water. Tomorrow morning was the very earliest moment that a move could be made.

It was absurdly like the scene that was being played out at this instant just a few miles away on the Suvla coast between Hamilton and Stopford. Feizi’s arguments were precisely
Stopford’s, and there was nothing that Hamilton was saying that Liman left unsaid. One has a glimpse of a strange pattern of enemies here. Had the circumstances permitted it, General Stopford
and Feizi Bey might have found much to commune with together, for Stopford too had not enjoyed his harrying from G.H.Q. nor Hamilton’s direct interference in the battle. It even seems
possible that Hamilton and Liman might have felt themselves closer to each other than to their reluctant generals, for they had a common emotion of frustration and impotence; each thought he was
being baulked, not by bad luck or any fault in his plans, but by the incompetence of his corps commander.

Yet on balance Liman’s situation was worse than Hamilton’s—even much worse. Hamilton at least had his men on the spot, and
at that moment was getting out
orders for them to advance to the vital ridge at Tekke Tepe. At Anzac Birdwood was preparing still another onslaught on Sari Bair, and Allanson and the New Zealanders at the spearhead were getting
ready for their final rush to the summit. The Turks on Chunuk Bair were in a more critical position than anyone on the British side had guessed. Their casualties had been appalling: one after
another the senior officers had been killed or wounded, and they had been forced to put a certain Lieut.-Colonel Potrih in command. He can hardly have been a really useful commander, for he was the
Director of Railways at Constantinople, and it was only by chance that he was visiting the front at this moment. Then too, in the course of the fighting the battalions had become scarcely less
mixed up than the British, and their battle order was now chaotic. A stream of agitated messages was coming in from the junior officers in the line. ‘An attack has been ordered on Chunuk
Bair,’ one message ran. ‘To whom should I give this order? I am looking for the battalion commanders but I cannot find them. Everything is in a muddle.’ And again: ‘I have
received no information about what is going on. All the officers are killed and wounded. I do not even know the name of the place where I am. I cannot see anything by observation. I request in the
name of the safety of the nation that an officer be appointed who knows the area well.’ And still again—‘At dawn some troops withdrew from Sahinsirt towards Chunuk Bair and they
are digging in on Chunuk Bair but it is not known whether they are friends or enemies.’

These were the men upon whom Allanson was preparing to rush at first light in the morning.

At Helles too things had suddenly become very sinister for the Turks. Although the British did not know it, their holding attack had extended the Turkish defence to the edge of its endurance,
and the German chief-of-staff there had lost his nerve. He had sent a signal to Liman urging that the whole tip of the peninsula should be abandoned—that the troops there should be evacuated
across the Dardanelles to Asia ‘while there is still time to extricate them’.

But Liman’s methods were a good deal more ruthless than those
of the British Commander-in-Chief, and in this triple crisis he acted very promptly. He removed the
German chief-of-staff from his post at Cape Helles, and instructed the commanding general there that in no circumstances whatever was a single yard of ground to be given up. As for the unfortunate
Feizi Bey, who had failed to make his attack at Suvla, he was dismissed out of hand. He was woken out of his sleep at 11 p.m. that night and bundled off to Constantinople. A new command was created
embracing the whole battle area from Chunuk Bair to Suvla, and it was given to Mustafa Kemal.

In his account of the campaign Liman gives no explanation of why his choice fell on Kemal. He simply says, ‘That evening I gave command of all the troops in the Anafarta section to Colonel
Mustafa Kemal . . . I had full confidence in his energy.’ Yet it was a surprising appointment to make. One can only conclude that Liman had long since divined Kemal’s abilities, but had
been prevented by Enver from promoting him. But now in this extreme crisis he could afford to ignore Enver.

Kemal had been in the heaviest of the fighting on the Anzac front from the beginning. His 19th Division had met the first shock of the New Zealand advance; it had demolished the Australian Light
Horse on August 7 and it had been fighting night and day ever since. In Kemal’s view the Turkish position had, by then, become ‘extremely delicate’, and he told Liman’s
chief-of-staff so over the telephone on August 8. Unless something was quickly done to straighten out the tangle on Chunuk Bair, he said, they might be forced to evacuate the whole ridge. A unified
command on the front was essential. ‘There is no other course,’ he went on, ‘but to put all the available troops under my command.’

Liman’s chief-of-staff at that stage had no notion that Kemal, who was always a troublesome figure at headquarters, was about to be promoted, and he permitted himself to say ironically,
‘Won’t that be too many troops?’

‘It will be too few,’ Kemal replied.

So now, after he had been awake for two nights at Anzac and continually in the front line, Kemal suddenly found himself in
charge of the battle. He seems to have been not
at all dismayed. Having calmly given orders to his successor in command of the 19th Division on Battleship Hill, he got on his horse and rode across the dark hills to Suvla. One has a vivid picture
of him on this solitary midnight ride. Physically he was quite worn out, and his divisional doctor was giving him doses to keep him going. He had grown very thin, his eyes were bloodshot, his voice
grating with fatigue, and the battle had brought him to a state of nervous tension which was perhaps not far from fanaticism, except that it was fanaticism of a cold and calculating kind.

With his doctor and an A.D.C. following on behind, he turned up at Willmer’s headquarters in the Suvla hills soon after midnight, and spent the next two hours making himself familiar with
the front. No one was able to tell him very much about the movements of the British, but he decided to make a general attack along the whole line from Tekke Tepe to the Sari Bair ridge in the
morning. The Bulair force had now arrived, and at 4 a.m. orders were sent out to the commanders telling them to be ready to start in half an hour; they were to advance directly to the heights and
then charge down into the Suvla plain on the other side.

As dawn was about to break the Tekke Tepe ridge was still empty. The British 32nd Brigade had not got under way so promptly as Hamilton had hoped on the previous night. Seven hours had gone by
while the men groped about in the thick scrub, constantly losing themselves in the winding goat tracks, and it was not until 3.30 a.m. that the brigade was assembled below the summit. At 4 a.m. it
advanced at last, and it was just half an hour too late; as the men in the leading company went forward the Turks burst over the rise above them. It was a tumultuous charge, and it annihilated the
British. Within a few minutes all their officers were killed, battalion and brigade headquarters were over-run, and men were scattering everywhere in wild disorder. In the intense heat of the
machine-gun fire the scrub burst into flames, and the soldiers who had secreted themselves there came bolting into the open like rabbits, with the smoke and flames billowing out behind them. At
sunrise Hamilton, watching from
the deck of the
Triad
, was presented with an awful sight. His men were streaming back across the plain in thousands, and at 6 a.m.,
only an hour and a half after the battle had begun, there seemed to be a general collapse. Not only were the hills lost, but some of the soldiers in their headlong retreat did not stop until they
reached the salt lake and the sea. ‘My heart has grown tough amidst the struggles of the peninsula,’ he wrote in his diary that night, ‘but the misery of this scene wellnigh broke
it. . . . Words are no use.’

Another two hours went by before the Turkish fire slackened and the British began to rally themselves on a line across the centre of the plain. Hamilton then went ashore to look for Stopford,
who had landed overnight at a place called Ghazi Baba, close to the extreme tip of the northern arm of the bay. ‘We found Stopford,’ he says, ‘about four or five hundred yards to
the east of Ghazi Baba, busy with part of a Field Company of engineers supervising the building of some splinterproof headquarters huts for himself and his staff. He was absorbed in the work, and
he said it would be well to make a thorough good job of the dug-outs as we should probably be here for a very long time. . . . As to this morning’s hold-up, Stopford took it very
philosophically.’

And still the polite façade between the two men did not fail. Since headquarters was without news of the left flank on Kiretch Tepe Hamilton suggested that it might be a godd thing if he
went off on a reconnaissance in that direction. Stopford agreed, but thought that he himself had better stay at headquarters to deal with the messages coming in. Upon this Hamilton set off with an
A.D.C. on a long walk towards the hills and the Corps Commander returned to the building of his huts.

Later that day Stopford sent out a message to one of his divisional generals congratulating him on his stand. ‘Do not try any more today,’ he added, ‘unless the enemy gives you
a favourable chance.’

Kemal had watched the battle from a hilltop behind the front line, and by midday he was satisfied that he had nothing more to fear from the British on the Suvla front. But by now alarming
messages had reached him from Sari Bair: Allanson had gained
the ridge and the centre of crisis had obviously shifted there. At 3 p.m. Kemal went off on horseback through the
blazing heat, and having called in on Liman’s headquarters on the way, reached Chunuk Bair just as the evening light was failing. The situation there had grown worse. Allanson and his men had
been withdrawn, but other British troops had taken up their positions on the hill; a fresh Turkish regiment which was due to come up from Helles had not arrived, and the troops in the line were to
some extent demoralized by the British artillery fire and the continuing strain of the battle. Kemal, who was now spending his fourth night on his feet, at once ordered an attack for four-thirty on
the following morning, August 10. His staff protested that the men were incapable of further effort, but Kemal merely repeated his order and went off on a personal reconnaissance along the
front.