Gallipoli

But this for the moment was a side-issue, a single current moving against a turning tide. After the September offensive Joffre still withheld the four divisions earmarked for the Dardanelles, and the longer he delayed the more French opinion began to swing against the Asiatic landing altogether. With Serbia falling, Salonika appeared to be the more crucial strategic point for a new offensive. In London, too, Lloyd George and Carson,[28] the Attorney-General, were openly pushing their campaign against Kitchener, and the issue was rapidly narrowing down to a simple alternative: Salonika or Gallipoli, which was it to be? Hamilton’s army was now down to half its strength and the campaign was at a stalemate. Was it really worth while throwing good money after bad?

On October 11 Kitchener felt bound to acknowledge the pressure of these questions. He cabled Hamilton, ‘What is your estimate of the probable losses which would be entailed to your force if the evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula was decided upon and carried out in the most careful ma

When he read this Hamilton burst out, ‘If they do this they make the Dardanelles into the bloodiest tragedy of the world. I won’t touch it.’ Could they not understand that the Turks were worn out, that the Allied soldiers were reviving now in the cooler weather, that they had only to be supported at Gallipoli and they would get through? And what if a gale came up half way through the evacuation? It might cause a disaster only equalled in history by that of the Athenians at Syracuse.

The headquarters at Imbros was not the best of places in which to take calm decisions. Hamilton was suffering miserably from dysentery, and German aircraft had begun to raid the island. On this very day a quiverful of iron spikes had come rattling down about the General’s head.

In the morning, however, he sent off a sober reply. They must reckon on the loss of half the men, and all their guns and stores, he said. ‘One quarter would probably get off quite easily, then the trouble would begin. We might be very lucky and lose considerably less than I have estimated. On the other hand, with all these raw troops at Suvla and all these Senegalese at Cape Helles, we might have a veritable catastrophe.’

Privately Hamilton believed that the losses would be less than half — between 35 and 45 per cent. was his estimate — but his staff were in favour of the higher figure, and he adopted it to make his opposition to the evacuation absolutely clear. But there was more in Kitchener’s query than a balancing of estimates about evacuation: the whole question of Hamilton’s command was involved. Already there had been rumblings. On October 4 Kitchener had sent a private cable to Hamilton warning him that there had been a ‘flow of unofficial reports from Gallipoli’ adversely criticizing G.H.Q. at Imbros. Should they not make some changes, Kitchener suggested. Perhaps Braithwaite should come home.

Hamilton had indignantly refused. But it was clear now that he himself and everyone on Imbros were under fire.

Then on October 11, the same day that Kitchener had sent his cable about evacuation, the Dardanelles Committee approached the matter in an oblique but very definite way. They decided that reinforcements should be dispatched to the Near East, but they were not to go directly to Gallipoli; they were to be held in Egypt while a senior general, Haig or Kitchener himself — someone at any rate who was senior to Hamilton — went out and decided between Gallipoli and Salonika.

The truth was that Hamilton was diminishing fast in everybody’s estimation. He was the general who always nearly succeeded. He had badly mismanaged Suvla, and General Stopford, who had recently come home, was making some very serious charges about the interference of G.H.Q. in the battle. The headquarters staff, Stopford wrote in a report to the War Office, ‘lived on an island at some distance from the peninsula’ and had been greatly misinformed about the Turkish strength at Suvla. There was another factor. Hamilton was Kitchener’s man, and it was begi

But it was not the bombs, nor Stopford’s criticisms, not even the growing opposition to Kitchener and all his plans and protégés which was the immediate factor in the undoing of Hamilton’s reputation at this moment. It was an Australian journalist named Keith Murdoch. His entry into the explosive scene is one of the oddest incidents in the Gallipoli campaign.

The trouble had begun far back in April with Ashmead-Bartlett, the war correspondent who represented the London press at the Dardanelles. According to Compton Mackenzie, who was in a position to know, Ashmead-Bartlett was not liked at headquarters. He was the stranger in the camp, a solitary civilian among professional and amateur soldiers. He was never captivated by Hamilton as the others were, but remained instead the detached hostile critic. He resented the censorship at G.H.Q., he disagreed with all their plans, and, worst of all, he was for ever predicting failure. Things grew to such a pitch that on one occasion, according to Mackenzie, the officers at Corps Headquarters at Cape Helles went into hiding in the rocks when Ashmead-Bartlett approached to avoid having to ask him to lunch.

Despite its self-imposed discomfort and its devotion, Imbros was not a very inspiring place for an outsider. Of necessity it was a club. There was a disguised but inescapable atmosphere of privilege, of the old school and the old regiment, of breeding and ma

It was against these things that Ashmead-Bartlett, burning with his own ideas, waged his private war. Hamilton’s outward attitude to him was polite and helpful, but he felt privately that Ashmead-Bartlett had too much power and that his depressing attitude was damaging the expedition. Ashmead-Bartlett’s persistent theme was that the Army should have landed at Bulair, and with this Hamilton did not agree. Nor was he very encouraging when Ashmead-Bartlett came to him one day with the suggestion that the Turkish soldiers in the trenches should be induced to desert by the offer of ten shillings and a free pardon. ‘This makes one wonder,’ Hamilton wrote after the interview, ‘what would Ashmead-Bartlett himself do if he were offered ten shillings and a good supper by a Mahommedan when he was feeling a bit hungry and hard-up among the Christians.’ In May, when Ashmead-Bartlett went home on leave, Hamilton appointed Mackenzie to fill his place and tried to make the arrangement permanent, but neither Mackenzie nor the authorities in London were enthusiastic. Ashmead-Bartlett came back and was more glum and despondent than ever.

28

Carson resigned soon afterwards over the failure of the Government to send adequate help to Serbia. ‘The Dardanelles operations,’ he told the House of Commons, ‘hang like a millstone round our necks, and have brought upon us the most vast disaster that has happened in the course of the war.’