Thunder at Dawn (27 page)

In a little the dawn began, and the grey trees took shape; the sun came up out of Asia, and we saw at last the little sugarloaf peak of Achi Baba, absurdly pink and diminutive in the distance. A man’s first frontal impression of that great rampart, with the outlying slopes masking the summit, was that it was disappointingly small; but when he had lived under and upon it for a while, day by day, it seemed to grow in menace and in bulk, and ultimately became an overpowering monster, pervading all his life; so that it worked upon men’s nerves, and almost everywhere in the Peninsula they were painfully conscious that every movement they made could be watched from somewhere on that massive hill.

But now the kitchens had come, and there was breakfast and viscous, milkless tea. We discovered that all around our seeming solitude the earth had been peopled with sleepers, who now emerged from their holes; there was a stir of washing and cooking and singing, and the smoke went up from the wood fires in the clear, cool air. D Company officers made their camp under an olive-tree, with a view over the blue water to Samothrace and Imbros, and now in the early cool, before the sun had gathered his noonday malignity, it was very pleasant. At seven o’clock the searching began. A mile away, on the northern cliffs, the first shell burst, stampeding a number of horses. The long-drawn warning scream and the final crash gave all the expectant battalion a faintly pleasurable thrill, and as each shell came a little nearer the sensation remained. No one was afraid; without the knowledge of experience no one could be seriously afraid on this cool, sunny morning in the grove of olive-trees. Those chill hours in the sweeper had been much more alarming. The common sensation was: ‘At last I am really under fire; today I shall write home and tell them about it.’ And then, when it seemed that the line on which the shells were falling must, if continued, pass through the middle of our camp, the firing mysteriously ceased.

Harry, I know, was disappointed; personally, I was pleased.

*

I learned more about Harry that afternoon. He had been much exhausted by the long night, but was now refreshed and filled with an almost childish enthusiasm by the pictorial attractions of the place. For this enthusiastic soul one thing only was lacking in the site of the camp: the rise of the hill, which here runs down the centre of the Peninsula, hid from us the Dardanelles. These, he said, must immediately be viewed. It was a bright afternoon of blue skies and gentle air — not yet had the dry north-east wind come to plague us with dust-clouds and all the vivid colours of the scene were unspoiled. We walked over the hill through the parched scrub, where lizards darted from under our feet and tortoises lay comatose in the scanty shade, and came to a kind of inland cliff, where the Turks had had many riflemen at the landing, for all the ground was littered with empty cartridges. And there was unfolded surely the most gorgeous panorama this war has provided for prosaic Englishmen to see. Below was a cool, inviting grove of imperial cypresses; all along the narrow strip between us and the shore lay the rest-lines of the French, where moved lazy figures in blue and red, and black Senegalese in many colours. To the left was the wide sweep of Morto Bay, and beyond the first section of Achi Baba rising to De Tott’s Battery in terraces of olives and vines. But what caught the immediate eye, what we had come to see and had sailed hither to fight for, was that strip of marvellously blue water before us, deep, generous blue, like a Chinese bowl. On the farther shore, towards the entrance to the Straits, we could see a wide green plain, and beyond and to the left, peak after peak of the mountains of Asia; and far away in the middle distance there was a glint of snow from some regal summit of the Anatolian Mountains.

That wide green plain was the Plain of Troy. The scarcity of classical scholars in Expeditionary Forces, and the wearisome observations of pressmen on the subject of Troy, have combined to belittle the significance of the classical surroundings of the Gallipoli campaign. I myself am a stolid, ill-read person, but I confess that the spectacle of those historic flats was not one, in diplomatic phrase, which I could view with indifference. On Harry, ridiculously excited already, the effect was almost alarming. He became quite lyrical over two little sweepers apparently anchored near the mouth of the Straits. ‘That,’ he said, ‘must have been where the Greek fleet lay. God! it’s wonderful.’ Up on the slope towards De Tott’s Battery the guns were busy, and now and then Asiatic Annie sent over a large shell from the region of Achilles’ tomb, which burst ponderously in the sea off Cape Helles. And there we sat on the stony edge of the cliff and talked of Achilles and Hector and Diomed and Patroclus and the far-sounding bolts of Jove. I do not defend or exalt this action; but this is a truthful record of a man’s personality, and I simply state what occurred. And I confess that with the best wish in the world I was myself becoming a little bored with Troy, when in the middle of a sentence he suddenly became silent and gazed across the Straits with a fixed, pinched look in his face, like a man who is reminded of some far-off calamity he had forgotten. For perhaps a minute he maintained this rigid aspect, and then as suddenly relaxed, murmuring in a tone of inflexible determination, `I will.’ It was not in me not to inquire into the nature of this passionate intention, and somehow I induced him to explain.

It seemed that in spite of his genuine academic successes and a moderate popularity at school and at Oxford he had suffered from early boyhood from a curious distrust of his own capacity in the face of anything he had to do. In a measure, no doubt, this had even contributed to his successes. For his nervousness took the form of an intimate, silent brooding over any ordeal that lay before him, whether it was a visit to his uncle, or ‘Schools,’ or a dance: he would lie awake for hours imagining all conceivable forms of error and failure and humiliation that might befall him in his endeavour. And though he was to this extent forewarned and forearmed, it must have been a painful process. And it explained to me the puzzling intervals of melancholy which I had seen darkening his usually cheerful demeanour.

‘You remember last night,’ he said, I had been detailed to look after the baggage when we disembarked, and take charge of the unloading party? As far as I know I did the job all right, except for losing old Tompkins’ valise – but you can’t think how much worry and anxiety it gave me
beforehand
. All the time on the sweeper I was imagining the hundreds of possible disasters: the working-party not turning up, and me left alone on the boat with the baggage — the Colonel’s things being dropped overboard — a row with the M.L.O. — getting the baggage ashore, and then losing the battalion, or the working-party, or the baggage. It all worked out quite simply, but I tell you, Benson, it gave me hell. And it’s always the same. That’s really why I didn’t take a commission – because I couldn’t imagine myself drilling men once without becoming a permanent laughing-stock. I know now that I was a fool about that – I usually do find that out – but I can’t escape the feeling next time.

‘And now, it’s not only little things like that, but that’s what I feel about the whole war. I’ve a terror of being a failure in it, a failure out here — you know, a sort of regimental dud. I’ve heard of lots of them; the kind of man that nobody gives an important job because he’s sure to muck it up (though I do believe Eccleston’s more likely to be that than me). But that’s what I was thinking just now. Somehow, looking at this view — Troy and all that — and thinking how those Greeks sweated blood for ten years on afternoons like this, doing their duty for the damned old kings, and how we’ve come out here to fight in the same place thousands of years afterwards, and we still know about them and remember their names — well, it gave me a kind of inspiration; I don’t know why. I’ve got a bit of confidence  — God knows how long it will last — but I swear I won’t be a failure, I won’t be the battalion dud — and I’ll have a damned good try to get a medal of some sort and be like — like Achilles or somebody.’

Sheer breathlessness put a sudden end to this outburst, and since it was followed by a certain shyness at his own revelations I did not probe deeper. But I thought to myself that this young man’s spirit of romance would die hard; I did not know whether it would ever die; for certainly I had never seen that spirit working so powerfully in any man as a living incentive to achievement. And I tell you all this, because I want you to understand how it was with him in the beginning.

But now the bay was in shadow below us; on the hill the solemn stillness that comes over all trenches in the hour before dusk had already descended, and away towards the cape the Indians were coming out to kneel in prayer beside the alien sea.

The Romance of War was in full song. And, scrambling down the cliff, we bathed almost reverently in the Hellespont.

II

Those first three days were for many of us, who did not know the mild autumn months, the most pleasant we spent on the Peninsula. The last weeks of May had something of the quality of an old English summer, and the seven plagues of the Peninsula had not yet attained the intolerable violence of June and July. True, the inhabited portion of the narrow land we had won already was a wilderness, the myrtle, and rock-rose, and tangled cistus, and all that wealth of spring flowers in which the landing parties had fallen and died in April, had long been trodden to death, and there were wide stretches of yellow desert where not even the parched scrub survived. But in the two and a half miles of bare country which lay between the capes and the foot-hills of Achi Baba was one considerable oasis of olives and stunted oaks, and therein, on the slopes of the ridge, was our camp fortunately set. The word ‘camp’ contains an unmerited compliment to the place. The manner of its birth was characteristic of military arrangements in those days. When we were told, on that first mysterious midnight, to dig ourselves a shelter against the morning’s searching, we were far from imagining that what we dug would be our Peninsular ‘home’ and haven of rest from the firing-line for many months to come. And so we made what we conceived to be the quickest and simplest form of shelter against a merely temporary danger — long, straight, untraversed ditches, running parallel to and with but a few yards between each other. No worse form of permanent dwelling-place could conceivably have been constructed, for the men were cramped in these places with a minimum of comfort and a maximum of danger. No man could climb out of his narrow drain without casting a shower of dust from the crumbling parapet on to his sleeping neighbour in the next ditch; and three large German shells could have destroyed half the regiment. Yet there were many such camps, most of them lacking the grateful concealment of our trees. Such targets even the Turkish artillery must sometimes hit. There were no dug-outs in the accepted sense of the Western Front, no deep, elaborate, stair-cased chambers, hollowed out by miners with miners’ material.
Our
dug-outs
were
dug-outs in truth, shallow excavations scooped in the surface of the earth. The only roof for a man against sun and shells was a waterproof sheet stretched precariously over his hole. It is sufficient testimony to the poverty of the Turkish artillery that with such naked concentrations of men scattered about the Peninsula, casualties in the rest-camps were so few.

Each officer had his own private hole, set democratically among the men’s; and an officers’ mess was simply made by digging a larger hole, and roofing it with
two
waterproof sheets instead of one. There was no luxury among the infantry there, and the gulf which yawned between the lives of officer and man in France in the way of material comfort was barely discernible in Gallipoli. Food was dull and monotonous: for weeks we had only bully-beef and biscuits, and a little coarse bacon and tea, but it was the same for all, one honourable equality of discomfort. At first there were no canteen supplies, and when some newcomer came from one of the islands with a bottle of champagne and another of chartreuse, we drank them with ‘bully’ and cast-iron biscuit. Drinking water was as precious as the elixir of life, and almost as unobtainable, but officer and man had the same ration to eke out through the thirsty day. Wells were sunk, and sometimes immediately condemned, and when we knew the water was clear and sweet to taste, it was hard to have it corrupted with the metallic flavour of chemicals by the medical staff. Then indeed did a man learn to love water; then did he learn discipline, when he filled his water-bottle in the morning with the exiguous ration of the day, and fought with the desperate craving to put it to his lips and there and then gurgle down his fill.

In the spring nights it was very cold, and men shivered in their single blanket under the unimaginable stars; but very early the sun came up, and by five o’clock all the camp were singing; and there were three hours of fresh coolness when it was very good to wash in a canvas bucket, and smoke in the sun before the torrid time came on; and again at seven, when the sun sat perched on the great rock of Samothrace, and Imbros was set in a fleecy bed of pink and saffron clouds, there were two hours of pure physical content; but these, I think, were more nearly perfect than the morning because they succeeded the irritable fevers of the day. Then the crickets in the branches sang less tediously, and the flies melted away, and all over the Peninsula the wood fires began to twinkle in the dusk, as the men cooked over a few sticks the little delicacies which were preserved for this hour of respite. When we had done we sat under our olive-tree in the clear twilight, and watched the last aeroplanes sail home to Rabbit Islands, and talked and argued till the glow-worms glimmering in the scrub, and up the hill the long roll of the Turks’ rapid fire, told us that darkness was at hand, and the chill dew sent us into our crannies to sleep.

So we were not sorry for three days of quiet in the camp before we went up the hill; Harry alone was all eagerness to reach the firing-line with the least possible delay. But then Harry was like none of us; indeed, none of us were like each other. It would have been strange if we had been. War-chroniclers have noted with an accent of astonishment the strange diversity of persons to be found in units of the New Army, and the essential sameness of their attitude to the war. As if a man were to go into the Haymarket and be surprised if the first twelve pedestrians there were not of the same profession; were then to summon them to the assistance of a woman in the hands of a rough, and be still surprised at the similarity of their methods.

We were, in truth, a motley crowd, gathered from everywhere; but when we sat under that olive-tree we were very much alike – with the single exception of Harry.

Egerton, our company commander, a man of about thirty, with a round face, and a large head, was a stockbroker by profession, and, rather improbably, an old Territorial by pastime. He was an excellent company commander, but would have made a still more admirable second-in-command, for his training in figures and his meticulous habits in such things as the keeping of accounts were just what are required of a second-in-command and were lamentably deficient in myself. The intricacies of Acquittance Rolls and Imprest Accounts, and page 3 of the Soldier’s Pay-Book, were meat and drink to him, and in general I must confess that I shamefully surrendered such dainties to him.

Harry Penrose had the 14th Platoon. Of the other three subalterns perhaps the most interesting was Hewett. He, like Harry, had been at Oxford before the war, though they had never come together there. He was a fair, dreamy person, of remarkably good looks. Alone of all the ‘young Apollos’ I have known did he at all deserve that title. Most of these have been men of surpassing stupidity and material tastes, but Hewett added to his physical qualifications something of the mental fineness which presumably one should expect of even a modern Apollo. Intensely fastidious, he frankly detested the war, and all the dirt and disgust he must personally encounter. Like Harry, he was an idealist — but more so; for he could not idealize the war. But the shrinking of his spirit had no effect on his conduct: he was no less courageous than Harry or anyone else, and no less keen to see the thing through. Only, at that time, he was a little less blind. A year senior to Harry, he had taken Greats in 1914, and though his degree had been disappointingly low he had not yet lost the passionate attachment of the ‘Greats’ man to philosophy and thoughts of the Ultimate Truths. Sometimes he would try to induce one of us to talk with him of his religious and philosophical doubts; but in that feverish place it was too difficult for us, and usually he brooded over his problems alone.

Eustace, of the 26th Platoon, was a journalist by repute, though it was never discovered to what journal, if any, he was specially attached. His character was more attractive than his appearance, which was long, awkward, and angular; and if he had ever been to school, he would have been quite undeservedly unpopular for not playing games: undeservedly — because one could not conceive of him as playing any game. Physically, indeed, he was one of Nature’s gawks; intellectually he was nimble, not to say athletic, with an acute and deeply logical mind. As a companion, more especially a companion in war, he was made sometimes tedious by a habit of cynicism and a passion for argument. The cynicism, I think, had developed originally from some early grievance against Society, had been adopted as an effective pose, and had now become part of his nature. Whatever its origin it was wearing to us, for in the actual scenes of war one likes to cling to one’s illusions while any shred of them remains, and would rather they faded honourably under the gentle influence of time than be torn to fragments in a moment by reasoned mockery. But Eustace was never tired of exhibiting the frailty and subterfuge of all men, particularly in their relations to the war the
Nation
arrived for him as regularly as the German submarines would allow, and all his views were in that sense distinctly ‘National.’ If any of us were rash enough to read that paper ourselves, we were inevitably provoked to some comment which led to a hot wrangle on the Public Schools, or Kitchener, or the rights of the war, and the pleasant calm of the dusk was marred. For Eustace could always meet us with a powerfully logical case, and while in spirit we revolted against his heresies, we were distressed by the appeal they made to our reluctant reasons. Harry, the most ingenuous of us all and the most devoted to his illusions, was particularly worried by this conflict. It seemed very wrong to him that a man so loyal and gallant in his personal relations with others should trample so ruthlessly on their dearest opinions.

Burnett was of a very different type. Tall and muscular, with reddish hair and vivid blue eyes, he looked (as he wanted to look) a ‘man of action’ by nature and practice. He had ‘knocked about’ for some years in Africa and Australia (a process which had failed equally to establish his fortunes or soften his rough edges), and from the first he affected the patronizing attitude of the experienced campaigner. The little discomforts of camp life were nothing to him, for were they not part of his normal life? And when I emerged from my dug-out pursued, as I thought, by a ferocious centipede, he held forth for a long time on the best method of dispatching rattlesnakes in the Umgoga, or some such locality. By degrees, however, as life became more unbearable, the conviction dawned upon us that he was no less sensible to heat and hunger and thirst than mere ‘temporary’ campaigners, and rather more ready to utter his complaints. Finally, the weight of evidence became overwhelming, and it was whispered at the end of our first week at Gallipoli that ‘Burnett was bogus’. The quality of being ‘bogus’ was in those days the last word in military condemnation and in Burnett’s case events showed the verdict to be lamentably correct.

So we were a strangely assorted crowd, only alike, as I have said, in that we were keen on the winning of this war and resolved to do our personal best towards that end. Of the five of us, Hewett and Eustace had the most influence on Harry. Me he regarded as a solid kind of wall that would never let him down, or be guilty of any startling deviations from the normal. By Hewett he was personally and spiritually attracted; by Eustace alternately fascinated and disturbed. And it was a very bad day for Harry when Hewett’s death removed that gentle, comfortable influence.

*

We were ordered to relieve the –’s at midnight on the fourth day, and once again we braced ourselves for the last desperate battle of our lives. All soldiers go through this process during their first weeks of active service every time they ‘move’ anywhere. Immense expectations, vows, fears, prayers, fill their minds; and nothing particular happens. Only the really experienced soldier knows that it is the exception and not the rule for anything particular to happen; and the heroes of romance and history who do not move a muscle when told that they are to attack at dawn are generally quite undeserving of praise, since long experience has taught them that the attack is many times more likely to be cancelled than to occur. Until it actually does happen they will not believe in it; they make all proper preparations, but quite rightly do not move a muscle. We, however, were now to have our first illustration of this great military truth. For, indeed, we were to have no battle. Yet that night’s march to the trenches was an experience that made full compensation. It was already dusk when we moved out of the rest-camp, and the moon was not up. As usual in new units, the leading platoons went off at a reckless canter, and stumbling after them in the gathering shadows over rocky, precipitous slopes, and in and out of the clumps of bush, falling in dark holes on to indignant sleepers, or maddeningly entangled in hidden strands of wire, the rear companies were speedily out of touch. To a heavily laden infantryman there are few things more exasperating than a night march into the line conducted too fast. If the country be broken and strewn with obstacles, at which each man must wait while another climbs or drops or wrestles or wades in front of him, and must then laboriously scamper after him in the shadows lest he, and thereby all those behind him, be lost if the country be unknown to him, so that, apart from purely military considerations, the fear of being lost is no small thing, for a man knows that he may wander all night alone in the dark, surrounded by unknown dangers, cut off from sleep, and rations, and the friendly voices of companions, a jest among them when he discovers them: then such a march becomes a nightmare.

On this night it dawned gradually on those in front that they were unaccompanied save by the 1st platoon, and a long halt, and much shouting and searching, gathered most of the regiment together, hot, cursing, and already exhausted. And now we passed the five white Water Towers, standing mysteriously in a swamp, and came out of the open country into the beginning of a gully. These ‘gullies’ were deep, steep-sided ravines, driven through all the lower slopes of Achi Baba, and carrying in the spring a thin stream of water, peopled by many frogs, down to the Straits or the sea. It was easier going here, for there was a rough track beside the stream to follow yet, though those in front were marching, as they thought, with unnecessary deliberation, the rear men of each platoon were doubling round the corners among the trees, and cursing as they ran. There was then a wild hail of bullets in all those gullies, since for many hours of each night the Turk kept up a sustained and terrible rapid fire from his trenches far up the hill, and, whether by design or bad shooting, the majority of these bullets passed high over our trenches, and fell hissing in the gully-bed.