Gallipoli

Since the rules of the game, the actual methods of the fighting, were not in question, the generals had to find other reasons to explain their failure, and on the side of the Allies it usually boiled down to a matter of ammunition. If only they had had more shells to fire all would have been well. Just a few more rounds, another few guns, and the miracle would have happened. It had already been demonstrated at Gallipoli — and it was to be demonstrated over and over again on a much larger scale in France — that artillery bombardment was not the real way out of this suicidal impasse, but the British were strictly rationed in shells at Gallipoli, and this very shortage seemed to indicate that this was where their fatal weakness lay. Through June and July, there were times when Hamilton could think of nothing else, and he sent off message after message to Kitchener pointing out how badly served he was in the matter of ammunition compared with the armies in France.

‘A purely passive defence is not possible for us,’ he wrote; ‘it implies losing ground by degrees — and we have not a yard to lose… But, to expect us to attack without giving us our fair share — on Western standards — of high explosive and howitzers shows lack of military imagination.’ He went on: ‘If only K. would come and see for himself! Failing that — if only it were possible for me to run home and put my own case.’ But he did not go. Sometimes his staff found him looking aged and tired.

Through these months a gradual change overtook the commanders at Cape Helles in the pla

In the many books that were written about the campaign soon after the first world war, there is a constantly repeated belief that posterity would never forget what happened there. Such and such a regiment’s bayonet charge will ‘go down in history’; the deed is ‘immortal’ or ‘imperishable’, is enshrined forever in the records of the past. But who in this generation has heard of Lancashire Landing or Gully Ravine or the Third Battle of Krithia? Even as names they have almost vanished out of memory, and whether this hill was taken or that trench was lost seems hardly to matter any more. All becomes lost in a confused impression of waste and fruitless heroism, of out-of-dateness and littleness in another age. And yet if one forgets the actual battles — the statistics, the plans, the place-names, the technical moves — and studies instead the battlefield itself in its quieter moments, the feelings of the soldiers, what they ate and wore and thought and talked about, the small circumstances of their daily lives, the scene does become alive again and in a peculiarly vivid way. There can scarcely have been a battlefield quite like it in this or any other way.

Usually one approached Cape Helles from either Imbros or Lemnos in one of the trawlers or flat-bottomed boats that provided a kind of ferry service to the beaches after the battleships had sailed away. By day it was a pleasant trip through a sea of cool peacock blue, and it was only when one was within about five miles of the shore that one saw that it was overhung by a vast yellowish cloud of dust. This dust increased during heavy fighting and diminished at night, and with sudden changes of the wind, but it was usually there through these months of early summer. And with the dust a sickly carrion smell came out across the sea, as far as three miles at times. A fringe of debris with the same implications of rotte

‘The comparison with a seaside resort on a fine bank holiday,’ Compton Mackenzie wrote, ‘arrived so inevitably as really to seem rather trite. Yet all the time the comparison was justifying itself. Even the aeroplanes on the top of the low cliff eastward had the look of an ‘amusement’ to provide a sixpe

With this, however, all further comparison ended; the dust covered all, billowing, choking and vile, and the Turkish shells came through it with the noise of express trains crashing in the sky. This noise was continuous at times, and the soldiers endured it, not as a temporary pain, but as a natural condition of life. It was as inevitable as the weather. You were hit or not hit. Eating, sleeping and waking the long scream went on. These slopes by the sea were supposed to be rest areas, but they were often more dangerous than the frontline trenches a mile or two inland, since they exposed such obvious targets to the enemy: the piers, the incoming boats, the men bathing. From their perch on Achi Baba the Turks overlooked the whole bridgehead, and when the dust lifted they could see every tent, every gun emplacement, every man and animal that moved above the cliffs. The horses and the mules were terribly exposed to this bombardment, but they appeared to notice nothing until they were actually hit. Some blessed lacuna in the brain allowed them to stand there calmly with unfrightened eyes when the bursting shrapnel had sent all human beings to the ground. ‘Fountains of earth, fountains of water,’ a French doctor wrote to his wife; ‘shells cover us with a vault of steel, dissolving, hissing and noisy… without this radiantly beautiful light it would be frightfully sad.’

There were some — notably the more elderly men who were experiencing shellfire for the first time — who simply could not stand it and had to be invalided home: ‘Weak minds were upset,’ the doctor wrote. ‘Few were able to keep a real and immediate notion of things. There is a physical exaltation which deforms and obscures everything and makes one incapable of reasoning.’

The cool weather had lasted until the end of May, and during that time the soldiers were perfectly healthy. May was an idyllic month that year with wild flowers blooming everywhere, even between the front lines, and tremendous sunsets fell on Imbros and the monolithic rock of Samothrace. The shelling was not really troublesome and the men slept in tents. Then in June when the Turks set up their big guns behind Achi Baba a furious digging began, and the Army went underground into trenches and dugouts, sometimes uncovered to the sky, sometimes with a sheet of galvanized iron and a layer of earth for a roof. At first there was no regular shelling from Asia and the side of the cliffs facing south and east was a favourite spot for a home; it was known as Sea View Terrace. Then one day new guns opened up from Kum Kale across the straits, and the shells burst directly at the front doors of the dugouts which had seemed so safe before. The French corps held the eastern tip of the peninsula opposite Asia, and they suffered worst of all: 2,000 quarts of irreplaceable wine went up one day. By the end of the month a network of trenches and sunken roads stretched outward from the beaches to the front line, and it was possible to walk for miles without showing one’s head above the ground.