Gallipoli

THE Suvla-Anzac battles dragged on until the last week in August and, in the way of things at Gallipoli, there were at least two moments when just possibly the British might have broken through. On August 15, Irish troops thrust along the Kiretch Tepe ridge where the main enemy ammunition dump happened to be established. Liman regarded this attack as very dangerous. ‘If,’ he wrote, ‘on August 15 and 16 the British had taken the Kiretch Tepe they would have outflanked the entire Fifth Army and final success might have fallen to them.’

But the British had no such great objects in view. The attack was no more than a chance afterthought of Stopford’s, and the men were so ill-provided with ammunition that they were reduced at one stage to throwing rocks and stones at the Turks; and so in a day or two it petered out.

Then on August 21 Hamilton delivered a major assault on Scimitar Hill and Hill 60 on the south-east of the Suvla plain, and the 29th Division was brought round from Cape Helles to lead it. The soldiers fought in an unseasonable fog which obscured the hills from the British artillery at the opening of the battle, and as the day went on scrub fires broke out, filling the air with acrid smoke. In terms of numbers of men engaged this was the greatest battle fought in the Gallipoli campaign, and the last Turkish reserves were used up in bringing the Allies to a halt at nightfall. Yet in reality the issue had been decided on August 10, when Kemal recaptured the heights of Tekke Tepe and Chunuk Bair, and these later engagements were merely a restatement of the fact that when surprise was lost so too was the battle. There were no serious alterations in the front line.

Stopford continued adamant for inaction and entrenchment to the end. He protested in a series of messages to G.H.Q. that his New Army troops had let him down, that he was still without sufficient water and guns. On August 13, when the full bitterness of his failure was becoming apparent, Hamilton asked himself, ‘Ought I to have resigned sooner than allow generals old and yet inexperienced to be foisted on me?’ But he still took no action about Stopford, and it was Kitchener who extricated him from the skein of chivalry in which he was enmeshed. ‘If you deem it necessary to replace Stopford, Mahon and Hammersley,’ Kitchener cabled on August 14, ‘have you any competent generals to take their place? From your report I think Stopford ought to come home.’ A few hours later the Field Marshal cabled again, saying that General Byng, one of the men for whom Hamilton had pleaded in vain before the offensive began, was now to come out to Gallipoli from France. And he added, ‘I hope Stopford has been relieved by you already.’

Next day Hamilton sent for General de Lisle, the commander of the 29th Division, and told him to take over from Stopford at Suvla. General Mahon of the 10th Division was senior to de Lisle, and Hamilton wrote him a tactful note asking him to accept de Lisle’s orders until Byng arrived. But Mahon would have none of this. ‘I respectfully decline,’ he replied, ‘to waive my seniority and to serve under the officer you mention. Please let me know to whom I am to hand over the command of the Division.’ He was sent to cool off on the island of Lemnos, and the other elderly generals were dispatched with less ceremony; one of them who came to Hamilton and frankly admitted that he was not competent was found a job at the base, another was returned to England with Stopford, and on August 23 Hammersley was taken off the peninsula in a state of collapse.

They were all angry, disillusioned and exhausted. ‘An ugly dream came to me last night,’ Hamilton wrote. ‘… I was being drowned, held violently under the Hellespont. The grip of a hand was still on my throat, the waters were closing over my head as I broke away and found myself wide awake. I was trembling and carried back with me into the realms of consciousness an idea that some unca

For others, matters had already gone beyond dreams and Philippian visions; some 45,000 Allied soldiers had fallen in these August battles, and the hospital services which had never been organized to deal with such an avalanche of wounded were for a few days in almost as bad a state as anything which Florence Nightingale had found at the Crimea. Even private yachts which had turned up from England were pressed into service as hospital ships. But it was the collapse of the Army’s hopes which was the demoralizing thing. When all was over the gains amounted, in General Godley’s phrase, to ‘five hundred acres of bad grazing ground’; they had enlarged their hold on the peninsula to about eight square miles, perhaps a little less. Now, with Suvla added to their responsibilities, they had ‘three sieges to contend with instead of two’.

A dull, implacable e

Hamilton began a weary struggle to obtain reinforcements from Egypt, where a garrison of 70,000 men was immobilized, but General Maxwell, the commander there, was very reluctant. He was much concerned, he said, over the movements of the Senoussi tribesmen in the Libyan desert: they might attack at any moment. He could release no troops. Hamilton persisted and got the War Office to agree to the dispatch of two battalions. ‘That was yesterday,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘But the Senoussi must have heard of it at once, for Maxwell forthwith cables, “The attitude of the Senoussi is distinctly dangerous, and his people have been latterly executing night manœuvres round our post at Sollum”… I have renounced the two battalions with apologies, and now I daresay the Senoussi will retire from his night manœuvres round Sollum and resume his old strategic position up Maxwell’s sleeve.’ Hamilton, too, was becoming bitter.

The Turks did not attack. Half their entire army was now in the peninsula, but they too had suffered heavily in August, and were numbed by the same lethargy and weariness. It was the spent atmosphere of convalescence — perhaps hardly as yet convalescence — which had followed the assault on Anzac in May and all the other major battles. For the time being they had had enough of mass killing. Once more gifts of food and cigarettes were thrown back and forth between the trenches, and the war ceased to be a matter of rage, of pitched battle in the open, but of individual professional skill. They sniped. They dug tu