Gallipoli

The colours of the landscape changed. Grass vanished from the ground, and in place of green crops there were now wide areas covered with the fading purple flowers of the wild thyme, the dried-up sticks of asphodel, an occasional dusty pink oleander, a green fig or a pomegranate with its little flame-coloured blossom on the fruit. All the rest was brown and bare and ankle-deep in dust, a semi-desert scene. With the increasing heat the summer insects and animals emerged, and many of the soldiers, their lives narrowed down to the few square yards of ground around them, became aware for the first time of tarantulas and centipedes, the scorpion and the lizard, the incessant midday racket of the cicadas in the trees. Mackenzie, straining his eyes through his binoculars to see an attack at the front, found a tortoise crawling across his line of vision.

By July the heat reached a steady eighty-four degrees in the shade. But there was no shade: from four in the morning until eight at night the sun glared down and made an oven out of every trench and dug-out. It was a fearful heat, so hot that the fat of the bully beef melted in the tins, and a metal plate would become too hot to touch. Some of the soldiers were supplied with topees, but most wore the same uniform which had been issued to the Army in France: a flat peaked cap, a thick khaki serge tunic and breeches, puttees and boots. There were no steel helmets.

On the heights above, the Turks had a constant supply of good drinking water, but with the exception of one or two springs in Gully Ravine there were no wells in the Cape Helles bridgehead; water had to be brought by sea from the Nile in Egypt, 700 miles away, pumped ashore and carried up to the front by mules. Sometimes the men were down to a third of a gallon of water a day for all purposes, and it was even worse at Anzac, where they were forced to condense salt water from the sea.

In the end probably these discomforts were not too much, and the men adjusted themselves. But the thing that was absolutely unbearable was the flies. They began to multiply in May; by June they were a plague, and it was a plague of such foulness and persistence that it often seemed more horrible than the war itself. The flies fed on the unburied corpses in no-man’s-land, and on the latrines, the refuse and the food of both armies. There was no escape for anybody even when night fell. No tin of food could be opened without it being covered instantly with a thick layer of writhing insects. One ate them with the food and swallowed them with the water. You might burn them off the walls and ceiling of your dugout at night but another horde would be there in the morning. You washed and shaved with flies about your face and hands and eyes, and even to the most toughened soldier it was horribly apparent that they were often bloated with feeding on the blood of dead animals and men. Mosquito nets were almost unknown, and one of the most valuable possessions a soldier could have was a little piece of muslin veiling, which he could put over his face when he ate or slept. To avoid the flies some of the men learned to write their letters home in the darkness of their dug-outs at night.

From June onwards dysenteric diarrhœa spread through the Army and soon every man was infected by it.[20] Many of the soldiers were able to endure it without reporting sick, but some soon became too weak even to drag themselves to the latrines, and by July, when over a thousand men were being evacuated every week, the disease had become far more destructive than the battle itself. Quite apart from the discomfort and the self-disgust it created an overmastering lassitude. ‘It fills me,’ Hamilton wrote, ‘with a desperate longing to lie down and do nothing but rest… and this, I think, must be the reason the Greeks were ten long years in taking Troy.’

The flies no doubt were principally to blame for the spread of the disease, but the food can scarcely have helped: the salt and fatty bully beef, the absence of all green vegetables. The N.A.A.F.I. stores of later campaigns did not exist at Gallipoli, and there were no means by which the soldiers could buy small luxuries to vary the monotony of their diet. There was a rum ration which was doled out at long intervals, very occasionally they got eggs or perhaps a parcel from home, or even fresh fish (by throwing hand-grenades into the sea) but for the rest it was a monotonous routine of milkless tea, bully beef and plum and apple jam.

The medical services came near to breaking down during this period; they had been organized on the principle that hospitals would be set up on the peninsula soon after the original landing, and when this failed to happen hurried arrangements were made to establish a base under canvas on the island of Lemnos, while the more serious cases were evacuated to Egypt, Malta and even England. Lemnos soon became overwhelmed by the increasing number of casualties and there were never enough hospital ships to cope with the overflow.

And now in June the doctors were faced with this major epidemic of dysentery in the Army. ‘Well, you won’t die of it,’ was the current phrase. But men did die, and the bodies were simply sewn up in blankets and buried in the nearest cemetery. The great majority who survived suffered dreadfully, and perhaps u

Trained dentists were unknown at Gallipoli; if a man got toothache, or broke his teeth on the ration biscuits — a thing that happened quite often — he had to put up with it as best he could, unless he was lucky enough to find some hospital orderly who was able to make rough repairs.

These things began to cause a growing resentment in the Army. ‘The men are getting pretty tired,’ Aubrey Herbert wrote. ‘They are not as resigned as their ten thousand brother monks over the way at Mount Athos.’

On June 1 Hamilton had abandoned his cheese-ridden berth aboard the Arcadian and had set up his headquarters on the island of Imbros. But the staff there were hardly better off than anybody else, except that they were not under fire. They had put up their tents on a particularly dreary stretch of coast where there was no shade, and the fine biscuit-coloured sand blew into their faces all day. There existed close by a perfectly good site on level ground among figs and olive trees, but this was deliberately ignored partly because they did not wish to give the camp an air of permanence — the next attack might gain enough ground to allow them to land on the peninsula — and partly because it was felt that the staff should know something of the hardships and miseries of the men at the front. Almost uneatable food was provided to strengthen this illusion. It does not seem to have occurred to the General or any of his senior officers that efficiency mattered more than appearances, and that a man suffering from dysentery — from the flies, the bad food and the heat — was not likely to give his best attention to his work.

And in fact an exasperating muddle began to overtake affairs in the rear areas and along the lines of supply. Most of it was centred on Lemnos and its harbour of Mudros where many of the base installations had been dumped down. Ships arrived without manifests and had to be unloaded before the transport officers could discover what was in them. Often cargoes were sent in the wrong vessels to the wrong places, or became lost or mixed up with other cargoes. New shells arrived without the new keys which were essential to them. Mail disappeared. A polyglot crowd of men in transit hung about the shore waiting for orders. ‘Mingling among them all,’ Admiral Wemyss, the Governor, wrote in his diary,[21] ‘is the wily Greek, avaricious and plausible, making much money out of both of the others (the French and the British) hawking every sort of commodity from onions to Turkish Delight and Beecham’s Pills.’ At the the front someone invented a phrase which expressed the soldiers’ view of the islands. It was ‘Imbros, Mudros and Chaos’.

20

Dysentery was nothing new on the Gallipoli peninsula. Xerxes’ soldiers were infected with it on their return march from Greece to the Hellespont in the fifth century B.C.

21

Perhaps because of its isolation and its strangeness, perhaps because of the lack of other entertainment, the Gallipoli campaign produced an extraordinary number of diaries. Every other man seems to have kept one, and no doubt the notebooks still exist in tens of thousands of homes. It was customary to illustrate them with sketches and photographs, and perhaps some wild flower, a bird’s feather, a souvenir like a captured Turkish badge, pressed between the leaves.