Gallipoli

In many ways the men in the opposing trenches must have felt mentally and emotionally closer to one another than to the shadowy figures of the commanding generals and the politicians in the rear. Like poverty, the extreme danger and hardship of the trenches reduced them all, British and Turks alike, to a bare level of existence, and they were set apart from the rest of the world. They may have hated it, but it drew them together, and now more than ever they had for one another the friendly cruelty of the very poor. This was an exact and prescribed arena, and until they were released from it and made safe and comfortable again they were hardly likely to know much about the propaganda animosities and the vicious fears of those who, being behind the lines, endured the war only at second-hand. For the moment the shared misery of dysentery, of flies, of dirt and lice was all.

Herbert records a curious instance of this detached and clinical attitude in the trenches. ‘The fact is,’ a Turkish prisoner said one day, ‘you are just a bit above our trenches. If you could only get your fire rather lower you will be right into them, and here exactly is the dugout of our captain, Risa Kiazim Bey, a poor, good man. You miss him all the time. If you will take a line on that pine tree you will get him.’

Sometimes the Turks would parley with Herbert across the front lines, but they resented as a rule being cajoled by deserters who had gone over to the British. Once for a few minutes they listened in silence and then a voice replied: ‘There are still Turks here and sons of Turks. Who are you? A prisoner? Then go away and don’t talk.’

The end of Ramadan, the Moslem period of fasting, came, and it was expected that the Turks might celebrate it with a new attack. But nothing happened. Instead, the Turkish soldiers made what shift they could to hold a feast in the trenches, and the British at some places sent them gifts.

By September it was already growing cold at night. A strong west wind would drive the sea into the salt lake at Suvla and hold it there until, after a few hours, the water drained out again. Once or twice there were sharp showers of rain accompanied by vivid lightning, and then on October 8 a gale blew up. It was an ominous warning for the British. At Suvla some of the provisioning barges broke loose and carried away ninety feet of the pier; and there was other damage to the improvised wharves at Anzac. ‘Both sides,’ Herbert wrote, ‘sat down grimly to wait for the winter.’

The Allies were waiting for something else as well, and it was even more serious than the winter. What was to become of them? Were they to attack again or stay where they were? Could they stay if Bulgaria came into the war against the Allies? If that happened — and it seemed quite likely now that the Suvla offensive had failed — Germany would have a through railway to Turkey. New guns and ammunition, perhaps even German and Bulgarian troops, could be brought down to the peninsula. Where were the reinforcements to meet them? And whether they were reinforced or not, how was the Navy to keep supplying the peninsula in heavy seas?

The soldiers in the ranks were aware that their fate was being decided in London and Paris, and they discussed the matter interminably in their dugouts. But there was never any definite news. They simply waited.

Hamilton knew what was going on in London, but it was so secret, so sensational and it so often blew hot and cold from week to week that he was not even able to confide in his corps commanders. In August he admitted to Kitchener that he had failed and could do no more unless he was reinforced again: and he needed another 95,000 men. Kitchener in reply said, in effect, that Gallipoli had been given its chance and lost it. The War Cabinet was now turning its mind back to France, and he had agreed to support Joffre in a vast offensive on the western front in September. Seventy French and British divisions were to be employed, and this meant that apart from normal replacements nothing more could be done for Gallipoli at the moment.

Then on September 2 a message arrived at Imbros saying that everything was changed. The French had suddenly and quite unpredictably come forward with an offer to send out a new army to the Dardanelles under the command of General Sarrail. Four French divisions were to be embarked at Marseilles to join the two already at Cape Helles, and they were to be landed on the Asiatic side. The British government would replace the French taken from Cape Helles with two fresh divisions of their own. Hamilton could scarcely believe it when he read the cable. ‘From bankrupt to millionaire in twenty-four hours,’ he wrote. ‘The enormous spin of fortune’s wheel makes me giddy.’ Now they were bound to get through; the Turks had had the go knocked out of them already and this new attack in Asia would be the finish. He himself would offer to serve under Sarrail if that would help to buttress this wonderful piece of news.

The appointment of Sarrail was a devious affair with roots reaching back as far as the Dreyfus case. Sarrail, a Radical-Socialist, an anti-cleric, had been relieved of his command at Verdun by Joffre, but he was politically strong enough to force the French government to find him another appointment. And so he was to have this new independent command in the Near East. Joffre was not in a position to block the appointment, but he could delay and weaken it, and this he was already doing by the time Hamilton got his cable. The four French divisions, he insisted, were not to go to the Dardanelles until after the September offensive had been fought on the western front.

Hamilton got this news on September 14. The earliest date on which the new soldiers could arrive, Kitchener now told him, was mid-November. ‘Postponed!’ the entry runs in Hamilton’s diary. ‘The word is like a knell.’ There was worse to follow.

In the last week of September Bulgaria mobilized, and it was apparent that within a matter of days she would be marching with the Germans and Austrians against Serbia. There was only one way of bringing help to the Serbians, and that was by attacking Bulgaria through Greece. But the Greek government was now insisting that if she was to enter the war she must be supported by an Allied force at Salonika. There was not much time. Kitchener and Joffre agreed that two divisions, one French and the other British, must be sent from Gallipoli to Salonika at once. If necessary Hamilton would have to abandon Suvla and again confine himself to the bridgeheads at Anzac and Cape Helles.

This blow fell on Imbros on September 26, and Hamilton forced himself to take it philosophically. He wrote in his diary early in October, ‘At whose door will history leave the blame for the helpless, hopeless fix we are left in — rotting with disease and told to take it easy.’ But he loyally sent off the two divisions to Salonika and fitted them out as well as he could before they left.

By now, however, events had come to a crisis where two divisions could make little difference one way or another. Joffre’s offensive in the west failed with the loss of a quarter of a million men. Then on October 9 the Germans and Austrians fell on Belgrade, while on the following day the Bulgarians attacked Serbia from the east. The Allies’ force at Salonika was too small, too disorganized and too far away to do anything but to look on helplessly. And it was one more galling twist that the removal of the two divisions from Gallipoli had precisely the reverse effect on Greece to the one anticipated. Seeing Hamilton’s army reduced like this, King Constantine at once made up his mind that the Allies were about to abandon Gallipoli. He dismissed his anti-German Prime Minister, Venizelos, and decided upon a neutrality which, if not actively hostile to the Allies, was at least not helpful.

There was but one ray of hope for Gallipoli in all this. Keyes wanted the Fleet to assault the Narrows again. He had argued for it after the August battles had failed, he argued all through September, and with a new ally — Admiral Wemyss, the Commander-in-Chief at Lemnos — he was still arguing in October. De Robeck was still opposed but he allowed Keyes to draw up a new plan and propound it to a group of senior admirals at the Dardanelles. They were caught again in the old half-emotional dilemma. They felt deeply about the losses of the Army, they wanted to attack, and they again half believed that in the end the Admiralty would order them to do so. But still they could not clearly see how it was to be done. Eventually a compromise was decided upon: Keyes was to go to London and put the matter personally to the Admiralty and the War Cabinet.