Gallipoli

‘From the standpoint of an early solution of our difficulties, your views, as stated, are not encouraging. The question whether we can long support two fields of operation draining on our resources requires grave consideration. I know that I can rely on you to do your utmost to bring the present unfortunate state of affairs in the Dardanelles to as early a conclusion as possible, so that any consideration of a withdrawal, with all its dangers in the East, may be prevented from entering the field of possible solutions.

‘When all the above is taken into consideration, I am somewhat surprised to see that the 4,500 which Maxwell can send you are apparently not required by you. With the aid of these I had hoped that you would have been in a position to press forward.’

Hamilton wrote in his diary: ‘I can only surmise that my request made to Maxwell that these 4,500 men should come to me as drafts for my skeleton units, instead of as a raw brigade, has twisted itself going down some official corridor into a story that I don’t want the men! K. tells me Egypt is mine and the fatness thereof; yet no sooner do I make the most modest suggestion concerning anything or anyone Egyptian than K. is got at and I find he is the Barmecide and I Schac’abac.[16] “How do you like your lentil soup?” says K. “Excellently well,” say I, “but devil a drop is in the plate!” I have got to enter the joke; that’s the long and short of it.”

There is a revealing quality about this grotesque little incident, for it was symptomatic of the general tug-of-war in which they were all engaged: Maxwell withholding troops from Hamilton, Fisher withholding ships from Churchill, the Conservatives withholding political support from Asquith. The setback at Gallipoli, in short, had brought out into the open, and more bitterly than ever, the great issue which in the end was to dominate all others before the end of the year: were they to fight in the East or the West?

Meanwhile on the peninsula the Army’s store of ammunition had fallen so low that the guns were rationed to two shells a day. On the two fronts at Anzac and Cape Helles there was desultory fighting from time to time, but hardly more than a few yards of ground changed hands, and it seemed now that nothing could break the deadlock. Yet the situation could not remain as it was, some sort of decision would have to be taken. And, in fact, at this ultimate moment of hesitation, a glimpse of reality was on its way. A few moments before dawn, on this same day, May 19, General Birdwood was woken in his dugout at Anzac with the news that, in a packed mass of many thousands, the Turks were streaming across to his trenches in the darkness.

CHAPTER NINE

THERE is some dispute as to who ordered the attack on the Anzac bridgehead on the night of May 18. Liman von Sanders says that he himself made the plan and he takes the responsibility for it; others believe that it was conceived by Enver when he first visited the peninsula on May 10, and the circumstances of the enterprise do, in fact, bear the impress of Enver’s headlong cast of mind. There was no subtlety or caution about the matter: some 42,000 men under the command of Essad Pasha were assembled, and their orders were nothing less than to demolish the whole Anzac bridgehead at a single blow. By nightfall it was hoped that the last Dominion soldier would have been killed, captured or driven into the sea, and that the entire Turkish army would have then been free to turn south to deal with the remainder of Hamilton’s forces at Cape Helles.

At this time the Australian and New Zealand Corps had dwindled to some 10,000 effective men, and it was only by luck that a brigade which had been sent round to Cape Helles earlier in the month was returned to Birdwood on the eve of the battle. This brought his numbers to a total of about 17,000, of which 12,500 were available for fighting in the front line. They were thus outnumbered by more than three to one.

The Anzac position had by now become very clearly defined: it was a shallow triangle, covering about 400 acres, its base, a mile and a half long, resting on the sea, its apex reaching to the slopes of Sari Bair about a thousand yards from the shore. In order to avoid the fire of the British Fleet the Turks had dug their trenches almost on top of the Anzac lines, and at some places the two sides were divided by not more than ten yards. The situation at Qui

There was an intense hatred of the Turks among the Dominion soldiers. Most of them had grown up in a world of clear and obvious values; a fight was a fight, you knew who your enemy was and you stood up to him and had it out, fairly and squarely, in the open. It was in this spirit that they had volunteered for service in the Army. The charge was the thing, the quick and palpable blow in the face that knocked the man down. War, in fact, was an extension of the pub brawl, and it had in it the elements of rioting, of street fighting, of instant physical revenge.

But nothing of the kind had happened at Gallipoli. From the day they had landed the soldiers had scarcely ever seen the enemy; he lurked unseen in the heights above, he sniped down on them and caught them unawares, he stood back at a safe distance with his guns and burst his shrapnel above their heads, and there seemed to be no effective way of retaliating. After more than three weeks of this the soldiers were begi

Beyond this there was at this early stage another and perhaps deeper feeling that there was a monstrosity and inhumanity about the Turks: they were cruel and sinister fanatics, capable of any sort of vice and bestiality — in brief, it was the popular picture that had been drawn of them by Byron and the emotions of Gladstonian liberal England. The Turks were ‘natives’—but natives of a peculiarly dangerous and subtle kind. And so the Australian and New Zealand soldiers fought, not an ordinary man, but a monster prefigured by imagination and by propaganda; and they hated him.

16

A reference to the Arabian Nights tale in which a series of empty dishes is served to a hungry man.