:VEIUT.J k.*vo
[ARBOR]
Presented to the
LIBRARY of the
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
by
??.a?. JOITT ?.
GALLIPOLI
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO DALLAS
ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON BOMBAY ' CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
GALLIPOLI
BY
JOHN MASEFIELD
Author of "The Everlasting Mercy," "The
Story of a Round House," etc.
ILLUSTRATED
fork
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1916
All rights reserved
COPYRIGHT, 1916,
BY JOHN MASEPIELD
Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1916.
Reprinted November, twice, 1916.
DEDICATED
WITH DEEP RESPECT AND ADMIRATION TO
General Sir Ian Hamilton, G.C.B., D.S.O.
AND
Officers and Men under his Command,
March to October, 1915.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
PAGE
Map No. i 4
Map No. 2 38
A view showing Morte Bay, De Tott's Battery,
and the Asiatic Coast 46
A remarkable view of V Beach ...... 48
The S. S. River Clyde 52
Some of the barbed wire entanglements near Sed-
dul-Bahr 56
Exercising mules 92
Anzac from the Sea 116
View of Anzac, looking towards Suvla . . .134
Map No. 3 136
A " long focus " view taken over the top of our
trenches at Anzac 144
Australians at work at Anzac two days before the
evacuation took place 146
A boatload of British troops leaving the S. S. Nile
for one of the landing beaches 148
Inside an Australian trench 162
An Australian bringing in a wounded comrade to
hospital 224
Oliver said . . . " I have seen the Saracens: the
valley and the mountains are covered with them; and
the lowlands and all the plains; great are the hosts of
that strange people; we have here a very little com-
pany."
Roland answered ..." My heart is the bigger for
that. Please God and His holiest angels, France shall
never lose her name through me."
The Song of Roland.
GALLIPOLI
A LITTLE while ago, during a short visit to
America, I was often questioned about the Dar-
danelles Campaign. People asked me why
that attempt had been made, why it had been
made in that particular manner, why other
courses had not been taken, why this had been
done and that either neglected or forgotten,
and whether a little more persistence, here or
there, would not have given us the victory.
These questions were often followed by criti-
cism of various kinds, some of it plainly sug-
gested by our enemies, some of it shrewd, and
some the honest opinion of men and women
happily ignorant of modern war. I answered
questions and criticism as best I could, but in
the next town they were repeated to me, and
in the town beyond reiterated, until I felt the
need of a leaflet printed for distribution, giving
my views of the matter.
3
4 Gallipoli
Later, when there was leisure, I began to con-
sider the Dardanelles Campaign, not as a trag-
edy, nor as a mistake, but as a great human ef-
fort, which came, more than once, very near to
triumph, achieved the impossible many times,
and failed, in the end, as many great deeds of
arms have failed, from something which had
nothing to do with arms nor with the men who
bore them. That the effort failed is not against
it; much that is most splendid in military his-
tory failed, many great things and noble men
have failed. To myself, this failure is the sec-
ond grand event of the war; the first was Bel-
gium's answer to the German ultimatum.
The Peninsula of Gallipoli, or Thracian
Chersonese, from its beginning in the Gulf of
Xeros to its extremity at Cape Helles, is a
tongue of hilly land about fifty-three miles long,
between the ^Egean Sea and the Straits of the
Dardanelles. At its northeastern, Gulf of
Xeros or European end it is four or five miles
broad, then a little to the south of the town of
Bulair, it narrows to three miles, in a contrac-
tion or neck which was fortified during the
GALLIPOLI PENINSULA
The Squares show the areas of the
larger scale maps m the volume.
Map No. i
Gallipoli 5
Crimean War by French and English soldiers.
This fortification is known as the Lines of Bu-
lair. Beyond these lines, to the southwest, the
peninsula broadens in a westward direction, and
attains its maximum breadth, of about twelve
miles, some twenty-four miles from Bulair, be-
tween the two points of Cape Suvla, on the sea,
and Cape Uzun, within the Straits. Beyond
this broad part is a second contraction or neck,
less than five miles across, and beyond this,
pointing roughly west-southwesterly, is the final
tongue or finger of the Peninsula, an isosceles
triangle of land with a base of some seven miles,
and two sides of thirteen miles each, converging
in the blunt tip (perhaps a mile and a half
across) between Cape Helles and Cape Tekke.
There is no railway within the peninsula, but bad
roads, possible for wheeled traffic, wind in the
valleys, skirting the hills and linking up the prin-
cipal villages. Most of the travelling and com-
merce of the peninsula is done by boat, along
the Straits, between the little port of Maidos,
near the Narrows, and the town of Gallipoli
(the chief town) near the Sea of Marmora.
6 Gallipoli
From Gallipoli there is a fair road to Bulair
and beyond. Some twenty other small towns
or hamlets are scattered here and there in the
well-watered valleys in the central broad por-
tion of the Peninsula. The inhabitants are
mostly small cultivators with olive and currant
orchards, a few vineyards and patches of beans
and grains; but not a hundredth part of the
land is under cultivation.
The sea shore, like the Straits shore, is
mainly steep-to, with abrupt sandy cliffs rising
from the sea to a height of from one hundred
to three hundred feet. At irregular and rare
intervals these cliffs are broken by the ravines
or gullies down which the autumnal and winter
rains escape; at the sea mouth of these gullies
are sometimes narrow strips of stony or sandy
beach.
Viewed from the sea, the Peninsula is singu-
larly beautiful. It rises and falls in gentle and
stately hills between four hundred and eleven
hundred feet high, the highest being at about
the centre. In its colour (after the brief
spring) in its gentle beauty, and the grace and
Gallipoli 7
austerity of its line, it resembles those parts of
Cornwall to the north of Padstow from which
one can see Brown Willie. Some Irish hills
recall it. I know no American landscape like
it.
In the brief spring the open ground is cov-
ered with flowers, but there is not much open
ground; in the Cape Helles district it is mainly
poor land growing heather and thyme; further
north there is abundant scrub, low shrubs and
brushwood, from two to four feet high, fre-
quently very thick. The trees are mostly
stunted firs, and very numerous in the south,
where the fighting was, but more frequently
north of Suvla. In one or two of the villages
there are fruit trees; on some of the hills there
are small clumps of pine. Viewed from the
sea the Peninsula looks waterless and sun-smit-
ten; the few water-courses are deep ravines
showing no water. Outwardly, from a dis-
tance, it is a stately land of beautiful graceful
hills rolling in suave yet austere lines and cov-
ered with a fleece of brushwood. In reality
the suave and graceful hills are exceedingly
8 Gallipoli
steep, much broken and roughly indented with
gullies, clefts and narrow irregular valleys.
The soil is something between a sand and a
marl, loose and apt to blow about in dry weather
when not bound down by the roots of brush-
wood, but sticky when wet.
Those who look at the southwestern end of
the Peninsula, between Cape Suvla and Cape
Helles, will see three heights greater than the
rolling wold or downland around them. Seven
miles southeast from Cape Suvla is the great
and beautiful peaked hill of Sari Bair, 970 feet
high, very steep on its sea side and thickly
fleeced with scrub. This hill commands the
landing place at Suvla. Seven miles south
from Sari Bair is the long dominating plateau
of Kilid Bahr, which runs inland from the
Straits, at heights varying between five and
seven hundred feet, to within two miles of the
sea. This plateau commands the Narrows of
the Hellespont. Five miles further to the
southwest and less than six miles from Cape
Helles is the bare and lonely lump of Achi
Baba, 590 feet high. This hill commands the
Gallipoli 9
landing place at Cape Helles. These hills and
the ground commanded by them were the
scenes of some of the noblest heroism which
ever went far to atone for the infamy of -#ar.
Here the efforts of our men were made.
Those who wish to imagine the scenes must
think of twenty miles of any rough and steep sea
coast known to them, picturing it as roadless,
waterless, much broken with gullies, covered
with scrub, sandy, loose and difficult to walk
on, and without more than two miles of ac-
cessible landing throughout its length. Let
them picture this familiar twenty miles as domi-
nated at intervals by three hills bigger than the
hills about them, the north hill a peak, the cen-
tre a ridge or plateau, and the south hill a
lump. Then let them imagine the hills en-
trenched, the landing mined, the beaches tan-
gled with barbed wire, ranged by howitzers and
swept by machine guns, and themselves three
thousand miles from home, going out before
dawn, with rifles, packs, and water bottles, to
pass the mines under shell fire, cut through
io Gallipoli
the wire under machine gun fire, clamber up
the hills under the fire of all arms, by the glare
of shell-bursts in the withering and crashing
tumult of modern war, and then to dig them-
selves in in a waterless and burning hill while
a more numerous enemy charge them with the
bayonet. And let them imagine themselves
enduring this night after night, day after day,
without rest or solace, nor respite from the
peril of death, seeing their friends killed, and
their position imperilled, getting their food,
their munitions, even their drink, from the jaws
of death, and their breath from the taint of
death, and their brief sleep upon the dust of
death. Let them imagine themselves driven
mad by heat and toil and thirst by day, shaken
by frost at midnight, weakened by disease and
broken by pestilence, yet rising on the word
with a shout and going forward to die in exul
tation in a cause foredoomed and almost hope-
less. Only then will they begin, even dimly, to
understand what our seizing and holding of
the landings meant.
All down the southeastern coast of this Pen-
Gallipoli 1 1
insula or outlier from Europe is a channel of
sea, known, anciently, as the Hellespont, but in
modern times more generally as the Darda-
nelles, from old fortifications of that name near
the southwestern end of the Strait. This chan-
nel, two or three miles across at its southwest-
ern end, broadens rapidly to four or five, then
narrows to two, then, for a short reach, to one
mile or less, after which (with one more con-
traction) it maintains a steady breadth of two
or three miles till it opens into the great salt
lake of the Sea of Marmora, and thence by
another narrow reach into the Black Sea, or
Euxine.
It is a deep water channel, with from 25 to
50 fathoms of water in it throughout its length.
The Gallipoli, or European, shore is steep-to,
with a couple of fathoms of water close inshore,
save in one or two beaches, where it shoals.
On the Asian shore, where the ground is lower
and the coast more shelving, the water is shal-
lower. A swift current of from two to three
knots an hour runs always down the channel
from the Sea of Marmora; and this with a
1 2 Gallipoli
southwesterly gale against it makes a nasty
sea.
This water of the Hellespont is the most im-
portant channel of water in the world. It is
the one entrance and exit to the Black Sea, the
mouths of the Danube, Dniester, Dnieper and
Don and the great ports of Constantinople,
Odessa and Sebastopol. He who controls the
channel controls those ports, with their wealth
and their power to affect great conflicts. The
most famous war of all times was fought not for
any human Helen but to control that channel.
Our Dardanelles campaign was undertaken to
win through it a free passage for the ships of
the Allied Powers.
While the war was still young it became nec-
essary to attempt this passage for five reasons :
i. To break the link by which Turkey keeps
her hold as a European Power. 2. To di-
vert a large part of the Turkish army from op-
erations against our Russian Allies in the Cau-
casus and elsewhere. 3. To pass into Russia,
at a time when her northern ports were closed
by ice, the rifles and munitions of war of which
Gallipoli 13
her armies were in need. 4. To bring out of
Southern Russia the great stores of wheat lying
there waiting shipment. 5. If possible, to pre-
vent, by a successful deed of arms in the Near
East, any new alliance against us among the
Balkan peoples.
In its simplest form the problem was to
force a passage through the defended chan-
nel of the Dardanelles into the Sea of Mar-
mora, to attack the capital of Turkey in Eu-
rope, to win through the Bosphorus into the
Black Sea, securing each step in the advance
against reconquest by the Turks, so that ships
might pass from the ^Egean to the Russian
ports in the Black Sea, bringing to the Russians
arms for their unequipped troops and taking
from them the corn of the harvests of South-
ern Russia. t The main problem was to force
a passage through the defended channel of the
Hellespont.
This passage had been forced in the past by
a British naval squadron. In February, 1807,
Sir John Duckworth sailed through with seven
ships of the line and some smaller vessels, si-
14 Gallipoli
lenced the forts at Sestos and Abydos and de-
stroyed some Turkish ships; and then, fearing
that the Turks, helped by French engineers,
would so improve the fortifications that he
would never be able to get back, he returned.
On his return, one of his ships, the Endymion
frigate, 40 guns, received in her hull two stone
shot each 26 inches in diameter.
The permanent fortifications guarding the
Channel were added to and improved during
the nineteenth century. At the outbreak of
the war with Italy, four years ago, they were
equipped (perhaps by German officers) with
modern weapons. An attempt made by Ital-
ian torpedo boats to rush the Straits by night
was discovered by searchlights and checked by
a heavy fire from quick-firing and other guns.
All the torpedo boats engaged in the operations
were hit and compelled to return.
When Turkey entered the war against the
Allied Powers, her officers had every reason
to expect that the British or French fleets
would attempt to force the Channel. The mili-
tary prize, Constantinople and the control of the
Gallipoli 15
Black Sea (whether for peace or for offence),
was too great a temptation to be resisted.
Helped by their German allies they prepared
for this attack with skill, knowledge and imagi-
nation. The Turks had no effective battle
fleet, as in the sixteenth century, when they
sought their enemies upon their own coasts;
and had they had one they could not have
passed the British fleet blockading the Darda-
nelles; but they prepared the channel and its
shores so that no enemy ship might pass to seek
them.
More than the two great wars, in South Af-
rica and Manchuria, the present war has shown:
(a) that in modern war, defence is easier
and less costly in men and munitions,
however much less decisive, than at-
tack;
(b) that the ancient type of permanent
fortress, built of steel, concrete and
heavy masonry is much less easy to
defend against the fire of heavy mod-
ern howitzers and high explosives
than temporary field works, dug into
1 6 Gallipoli
the earth and protected by earth and
sandbags;
(c) that the fire of modern long range
guns is wasteful and ineffective un-
less the object fired at can be accu-
rately ranged, and the fire controlled
by officers who can watch the burst-
ing of the shells on or near the
target ;
"(d) that in restricted waters the fixed or
floating mine, filled with high explo-
sive, is a sure defence against enemy
ships.
Beginning with proposition (a), the Turks
argued that (unlike most defences) a defence
of the passage of the Dardanelles against naval
attack might well be decisive (i. e., that it
might well cause the attack to be abandoned or
even destroy the attacking ships) since ships
engaged in the attack would be under every dis-
advantage, since:
(b) Their guns, however heavy, would not
be overwhelmingly successful against temporary
field works and gun emplacements.
Gallipoli 17
(c) Their officers, unable in the first place
to locate the guns hidden on the shore, would be
unable to observe the effect of their fire, and
therefore unable to direct it, and this disad-
vantage would become greater as the ships ad-
vanced within the channel and became shut in
by the banks.
(d) They would be unable to enter the
channel until the waters had been dragged for
mines by mine sweepers. The batteries of
field guns hidden on the coast would perhaps
be sufficient to stop the progress of the mine
sweepers. If not, floating mines, alongshore
torpedo tubes, and the accurately ranged
and directed fire of heavy howitzers would
perhaps sink the ships of war as they ad-
vanced.
(e) A ship, if damaged, would be five hun-
dred miles from any friendly dock and seven
hundred miles from any friendly arsenal. Re-
plenishments of ammunition, fuel, food and
water would have to be brought to the attack-
ing fleet across these distances of sea, past
many islands and through one or two channels
1 8 Gallipoli
well suited to be the lurking grounds for enemy
submarines.
On the other hand, there was the possibility
that the heavy naval guns would make the field
works untenable, that observers in aeroplanes
and seaplanes would locate, range and observe
the fire upon the hidden batteries, that thus the
mine sweepers would be able to clear a passage
up the Straits without undue interruption, and
complete the task demanded of them without
military assistance.
Before operations could be begun by the Al-
lied fleets it was necessary to secure some har-
bour, as close as possible to the Straits, to serve
as what is called an advanced or subsidiary base,
where large stores of necessaries, such as fuel
and munitions, could be accumulated for future
use by the ships engaged.
The port of Mudros, in Lemnos, was se-
lected as this subsidiary base. This great nat-
ural harbour, measuring some two by three
miles across, provides good holding ground in
from five to seven fathoms of water for half
the ships in the world. Two islands in the fair-
Gallipoli 19
way divide the entrance into three passages,
and make it more easy for the naval officers to
defend the approaches. It is a safe harbour
for ocean-going ships in all weathers, but with
northerly or southerly gales, such as spring up
very rapidly there in the changeable seasons of
the year and blow with great violence for some
hours at a time, the port is much wind-swept
and the sea makes it dangerous for boats to
lie alongside ships. Mudros itself, the town
from which the port is named, is a small col-
lection of wretched houses inhabited by Levan-
tines, who live by fishery, petty commerce, and
a few olive gardens and vineyards. It has a
cathedral or largish church, and a small wooden
pier, without appliances, for the use of the na-
tive boatmen. The town lies to the east of
the harbour, on some rising ground or sand
which stands up a little higher than the sur-
rounding country. Behind it, rather more than
a mile away, are barren hills of some 800 or
900 feet. The port is ringed in with these
hills; it looks like a great extinct crater flooded
by the sea. Over the hills in fair weather the
2O Gallipoli
peaks of Samothrace can be seen. When the
spring flowers have withered the island is of
the colour of a lion's skin. Its only beauty
then is that of changing light.
Mudros in itself offered nothing to the Allied
fleets but a safe anchorage. It could not even
supply the ships with fresh water, let alone
meat, bread and vegetables. The island pro-
duces little for its few inhabitants; its wealth of
a few goats, fish, olives and currants could be
bought up in a week by the crew of one battle-
ship. Everything necessary for the operations
had therefore to be brought by sea and stored
in Mudros till wanted. When this is grasped,
the difficulties of the undertaking will be un-
derstood. There was no dock, wharf nor
crane in Mudros, nor any place in the harbour
where a dock or wharf could be built without
an immense labour of dredging. Ships could
not be repaired nor dry-docked there, nor could
they discharge and receive heavy stores save
by their own winches and derricks. [Through-
out the operations, ships had to serve as
wharves, and ships' derricks as cranes, and
Galllpoli 21
goods were shipped, re-shipped and trans-
shipped by that incessant manual labour which is
the larger half of war.
On the 1 8th February and following days,
the Allied Fleets attacked the forts at the en-
trance to the Straits and soon silenced them.
These were old-fashioned stone structures of
great strength, they were knocked about and
made untenable by the fire from the ships, but
not destroyed. After this first easy success
came delay, for the real obstacles lay within the
Straits, between Cape Helles and the Narrows.
Here, at intervals, very skilfully laid, com-
manded by many guns, ranged to the inch, were
eight big mine fields, stretching almost across
the navigable channel in different directions.
No ships could pass this part of the Straits until
the mines had been groped for and removed.
In thick and violent weather, under heavy fire,
and troubled by the strong current, the mine-
sweepers began to remove them, helped by the
guns of the fleet. But the fleet's fire could not
destroy the mobile field guns and howitzers
hidden in the gullies and nullahs (invisible from
22 Gallipoli
the ships) on the Asian shore and to the east of
Achi Baba. The Boers, and later, the Japan-
ese, had shown how difficult it is to locate well-
concealed guns. Even when sea- and aero-
planes had seen and signalled the whereabouts
of the hidden guns, the ships could only fire
at the flashes and at most hit some of the gun-
ners ; if their fire became too accurate the gun-
ners would retire to their shelters, or withdraw
their guns to new hidden emplacements. These
hidden guns, firing continually upon the mine-
sweepers, made the clearing of the mine fields
towards the Narrows a slow and bloody task.
On the 1 8th March, the ships developed a
fierce fire upon the shore defences, and in the
midst of the engagement the Turks floated
some large mines upon the attacking ships and
by these means sank three battleships, one
French, two English, the French ship with all
her crew.
Heavy and unsettled weather which made
mine-sweeping impossible broke off serious op-
erations for some days. During these days it
was decided, though with grave misgivings
Gallipoli 23
among the counsellors, that an army should be
landed on the Peninsula to second the next
naval attack.
It was now a month since the operations had
begun, and the original decision, to leave the
issue solely to the ships, had delayed the con-
centration of the troops needed for the task.
The army, under the supreme command of
General Sir Ian Hamilton, was assembling, but
not yet concentrated nor on the scene. Some
of it was in Egypt, some in transports at sea.
When it was decided to use the army in the
venture, much necessary work had still to be
done. The Turks had now been given so much
time to defend the landing places that to get
our troops ashore at all called for the most
elaborate preparation and the working out of
careful schemes with the naval officers. The
Germans boasted that our troops would never
be able to land; possibly at first thought, many
soldiers would have agreed with them, but Eng-
lish soldiers and sailors are not Germans; they
are, as Carlyle says, " far other " ; our Ad-
mirals and General felt that with courage and a
24 Gallipoli
brave face our troops could land. It was true
that the well-armed Turks were amply ready
and could easily concentrate against any army
which we could land and supply, a far larger
force, more easily supplied and supported.
But in the narrow Peninsula they could not
move their larger forces so as to out-flank us.
Our flanks could be protected always by the
fleet. And besides, in war, fortune plays a
large part, and skill, courage and resolution,
and that fine blending of all three in the uncom-
mon sense called genius, have often triumphed
even where common sense has failed. It was
necessary that we should divert large armies
of Turks from our Russian Allies in the Cau-
casus; it was desirable to strike the imaginations
of the Balkan States by some daring feat of
arms close to them; it was vital to our enter-
prise in Mesopotamia and to the safety of
Egypt that we should alarm the Turks for their
capital and make them withdraw their armies
from their frontiers. This operation, striking
at the heart of the Turkish Empire, was the
readiest way to do all these things.
Gallipoli 25
The army designated for this honourable
and dangerous task consisted of the follow-
ing:
A division of French soldiers, the Corps Ex-
peditionnaire de 1'Orient, under M. le General
d'Amade. This division was made up of
French Territorial soldiers and Senegalese.
The 29th Division of British regular
troops.
The Royal Naval Division.
The Australian and New Zealand Army
Corps.
The French Division and the 2Qth Division
of British Regular soldiers were men who had
been fully trained in time of peace, but the
Australian and New Zealand Army Corps and
the Royal Naval Division, who together made
up more than half the army, were almost all
men who had enlisted since the declaration of
war, and had had not more than six months' ac-
tive training. They were, however, the finest
body of young men ever brought together in
modern times. For physical beauty and nobil-
ity of bearing they surpassed any men I have
26 Gallipoli
ever seen; they walked and looked like the
kings in old poems, and reminded me of the line
in Shakespeare:
" Baited like eagles having lately bathed."
As their officers put it, " they were in the pink
of condition and didn't care a damn for any-
body." Most of these new and irregular for-
mations were going into action for the first
time, to receive their baptism of fire in " a feat
of arms only possible to the flower of a very
fine army."
Having decided to use the army, the ques-
tion how to use it was left to the Commanding
General, whose task was to help the British
fleet through the Narrows. Those who have
criticised the operations to me, even those who
know, or pretended to know the country and
military matters (but who were, for the most
part, the gulls or agents of German propa-
ganda) raised, nearly always, one or both of the
following alternatives to the attack used by Sir
Ian Hamilton. They have asked:
Gallipoli 27
1 I ) Why did he not attack at or to the north
of Bulair in the Gulf of Xeros, or
(2) Why did he not attack along the Asiatic
coast, instead of where he did, at Cape
Helles and Anzac?
Those who have asked these questions have
always insisted to me that had he chosen, either
alternative his efforts must have been successful.
It may be well to set down here the final and
sufficient reasons against either folly.
Firstly, then, the reasons against landing the
army at or to the north of Bulair in the Gulf
of Xeros.
i. The task demanded of the army was, to
second the naval attack in the Straits, i. e., by
seizing and occupying, if possible, the high
ground in the Peninsula from which the Turkish
guns molested the mine-sweepers. As this high
ground commanded the Asiatic shore, its occu-
pation by the British troops would have made
possible the passage of the Straits. This and
this alone was the task demanded of the army,
no adventure upon Constantinople was de-
signed or possible with the numbers of men
28 Gallipoli
available. How the army could have sec-
onded the naval attack by landing three or four
days' march from the Narrows within easy
reach of the large Turkish armies in European
Turkey is not clear.
Nevertheless, our task was to land the army
and all landing places had to be examined.
Pass now to :
(a) Bulair was carefully reconnoitred and
found to be a natural stronghold, so fortified
with earthworks that there was no chance of
taking it. Ten thousand Turks had been dig-
ging there for a month, and had made it im-
pregnable. There are only two landing places
near Bulair, one (a very bad one) in a swamp
or salt-marsh to the east, the other in a kind of
death-trap ravine to the west, both dominated
by high ground in front, and one (the east-
ward) commanded also from the rear. Had
the army, or any large part of it, landed at
either beach, it would have been decimated in
the act and then held up by the fortress.
(b) Had the army landed to the north of
Bulair on the coast of European Turkey it
Galllpoli 29
would have been in grave danger of destruc-
tion. Large Turkish armies could have
marched upon its left and front from Adrian-
ople and Rodosto, while, as it advanced, the
large army in Gallipoli, reinforced from Asia
across the Straits, could have marched from
Bulair and fallen upon its right flank and rear,
(c) But even had it beaten these armies,
some four times its own strength, it would none
the less have perished, through failure of sup-
plies, since no European army could hope to
live upon a Turkish province in the spring, and
European supplies could have been brought to
it only with the utmost difficulty and danger.
[There is no port upon that part of the Turkish
coast; no shelter from the violent southerly
gales, and no depth of water near the shore.
In consequence, no transports of any size could
approach within some miles of the coast to land
either troops or stores. Even had there been
depth of water for them, transports could not
have discharged upon the coast because of the
danger from submarines. They would have
been compelled to discharge in the safe har-
30 Gallipoli
hour of the subsidiary base at Mudros in Lem-
nos, and (as happened with the fighting where
it was) their freight, whether men or stores,
re-shipped into small ships of too light draught
to be in danger from submarines, and by them
conveyed to the landing places. But this sys-
tem, which never quite failed at Anzac and
Cape Helles, would have failed on the Xeros
coast. Anzac is some forty miles from Mud-
ros, the Xeros coast is eighty, or twice the dis-
tance. Had the army landed at Xeros, it
would have been upon an unproductive enemy
territory in an unsettled season of the year,
from eighty to twenty hours' steam from their
own safe subsidiary base. A stormy week
might have cut them off at any time from all
possibility of obtaining a man, a biscuit, a cart-
ridge or even a drink of water, and this upon
ground where they could with little trouble be
outnumbered by armies four times their
strength with sound communications.
Secondly, for the reasons against attacking
along the Asiatic coast:
(a) The coast is commanded from the Gal-
Gallipoli 3 1
lipoli coast and therefore less important to
those trying to second a naval attack upon the
Narrows.
(b) An army advancing from Kum Kale
along the Asiatic shore would be forced to
draw its supplies from overseas. As it ad-
vanced, its communications could be cut with
great ease at any point by the hordes of armed
Turks in Asia Minor.
(c) The Turkish armies in Asia Minor
would have attacked it in the right and rear,
those from Bulair and Rodosto would have
ferried over and attacked it in front, the guns
in Gallipoli would have shelled its left, and the
task made impracticable.
Some of those who raised these alternatives
raised a third; when the first two had been dis-
posed of, they asked, " Even if the army
could not have landed at Bulair or on the Asian
coast, why did it land where it did land, on
those suicidal beaches?" The answer to this
criticism is as follows: It landed on those
beaches because there were no others on the
32 Galllpoli
Peninsula, because the only landing places at
which troops could be got ashore with any pros-
pect of success however slight were just those
three or four small beaches near Cape Helles, at
the southwest end of the Peninsula, and the
one rather longer beach to the north of Gaba
or Kaba Tepe. All these beaches were seen to
be strongly defended, with barbed wire en-
tanglements on the shore and under the water,
with sea and land mines, with strongly en-
trenched riflemen, many machine guns, and an
ample artillery. In addition, the beaches close
to Cape Helles were within range of big guns
mounted near Troy on the Asian shore, and the
beach near Gaba Tepe was ranged by the guns
in the olive groves to the south and on the
hills to the north of it. A strong Turkish army
held the Peninsula, and very powerful reserves
were at Bulair, all well supplied (chiefly by
boat from the Asian shore) with food and
munitions. German officers had organised the
defence of the Peninsula with great professional
skill. They had made it a fortress of great
strength, differing from all other fortresses in
Gallipoli 33
this, that besides being almost impregnable it
was almost unapproachable. But our army had
its task to do, there was no other means of do-
ing it, and our men had to do what they could.
Any one trying to land, to besiege that fortress,
had to do so by boat or lighter under every gun
in the Turkish army. The Turks and the Ger-
mans knew, better than we, what few and nar-
row landing places were possible to our men,
they had more than two months of time in which
to make those landing places fatal to any enemy
within a mile of them, yet our men came from
three thousand miles away, passed that mile of
massacre, landed and held on with all their
guns, stores, animals and appliances, in spite of
the Turk and his ally, who outnumbered them
at every point.
No army in history has made a more heroic
attack; no army in history has been set such
a task. No other body of men in any modern
war has been called upon to land over mined
and wired waters under the cross fire of ma-
chine guns. The Japanese at Chinampo and
Chemulpho were not opposed, the Russians at
34 Gallipoli
Pitezwo were not prepared, the Spaniards at
Daiquiri made no fight. Our men achieved a
feat without parallel in war and no other
troops in the world (not even Japanese or
Gurkhas or Ghazis in the hope of heaven)
would have made good those beaches on the
25th of April.
II
Then said Roland : " Oliver, companion, brother
... we shall have a strong and tough battle, such as
man never saw fought. But I shall strike with my
sword, and you, comrade, will strike with yours; we
have borne our swords in so many lands, we have ended
so many battles with them, that no evil song shall be
sung of them." ... At these words the Franks went
forward gladly.
The Song of Roland.
LET the reader now try to imagine the na-
ture of the landing. In order to puzzle the
Turkish commander, to make him hesitate and
divide his forces, it was necessary to land or
pretend to land, in some force, simultaneously
at various places. A feint of landing was to
be made near Bulair, the French Corps Expe-
ditionnaire was to land at Kum Kale, to attack
and silence the Asiatic fortifications and batter-
ies, the Australian and New Zealand Army
Corps was to land at or near Gaba Tepe, while
men of the 29th and Royal Naval Divisions
landed at or near Cape Helles, some towards
Krithia on the north, others nearer Sedd-el-
Bahr on the southwest and south. The main
attacks were to be those near Gaba L Tepe and
Cape Helles.
At Cape Helles three principal landings were
to be made at the following places :
i. At Beach V, a small semi-circular sandy
37
38 Gallipoli
bay, 300 yards across, just west of the ruins
of Sedd-el-Bahr castle. The ground rises
steeply round the half circle of the bay exactly
as the seats rise in an amphitheatre. Modern
defence could not ask for a more perfect site.
2. At Beach W (to the west of V), where
,a small sandy bay under Cape Tekke offered
a landing upon a strip of sand about the size
of Beach V. The slope upward from this
beach is more gentle than at V, through a suc-
cession of sand dunes, above which the ground
was strongly entrenched. The cliffs north and
south are precipitous, and make the beach a
kind of gully or ravine. The Turks had placed
machine guns in holes in the cliff, had wired and
mined both beach and bay, and thrown up
strong redoubts to flank them. Beach W was
a death trap.
3. At Beach X (north of W, on the other
or northern side of Cape Tekke), a narrow
strip of sand, 200 yards long, at the foot of a
low cliff. This, though too small to serve for
the quick passage ashore of many men at a
time, was a slightly easier landing place than
Scale of Miles
o % Vfe % i a
Map No. 2
Gallipoli 39
the other two, owing to the lie of the ground.
Besides these main landings, two minor
landings were to be made as follows:
4. At Beach S, a small beach, within the
Straits, beyond Sedd-el-Bahr.
5. At Beach Y (on the ^Egcan, to the west
of Krithia), a strip of sand below a precipitous
cliff, gashed with steep, crumbling, and scrub-
covered gullies.
These two minor landings were to protect the
flanks of the main landing parties, " to dissemi-
nate the forces of the enemy and to interrupt
the arrival of his reinforcements." They were
to take place at dawn (at about 5 a. m. or half
an hour before the main attacks), without any
preliminary bombardment from the fleet upon
the landing places.
Near Gaba Tepe only one landing was to
be made, upon a small beach, 200 yards across,
a mile to the north of Gaba Tepe promontory.
The ground beyond this beach is abrupt sandy
cliff, covered with scrub, flanked by Gaba Tepe,
and commanded by the land to shoreward.
40 Gallipoli
For some days before the landing, the Army
lay at Mudros, in Lemnos, aboard its trans-
ports, or engaged in tactical exercises ashore
and in the harbour. Much bitter and ignorant
criticism has been passed upon this delay, which
was, unfortunately, very necessary. The
month of April, 1915, in the ^Egean, was a
month of unusually unsettled weather; it was
quite impossible to attempt the landing with-
out calm water and the likelihood of fine
weather for some days. In rough weather it
would have been impossible to land laden sol-
diers with their stores through the surf of open
beaches, under heavy fire, and those who main-
tain, that "other soldiers" (i. e. themselves)
would have made the attempt, can have no
knowledge of what wading ashore from a boat,
in bad weather, in the ^Egean or any other sea,
even without a pack and with no enemy ahead, is
like. But in unsettled weather the Gallipoli
coast is not only difficult but exceedingly danger-
ous for small vessels. The currents are fierce,
and a short and ugly sea gets up quickly and
makes towing hazardous. Had the attempt
Gallipoli 41
been made in foul weather a great many men
would have been drowned, some few would have
reached the shore, and then the ships would
have been forced off the coast. The few men
left on the shore would have had to fight there
with neither supplies nor supports till the enemy
overwhelmed them.
Another reason for delay was the need for
the most minute preparation. Many armies
have been landed from boats from the time of
Pharaoh's invasion of Punt until the present,
but no men, not even Caesar's army of invasion
in Britain, have had to land in an enemy's coun-
try with such a prospect of difficulty before
them. They were going to land on a food-
less cliff, five hundred miles from a store, in
a place and at a season in which the sea's ris-
ing might cut them from supply. They had to
take with them all things, munitions, guns, en-
trenching tools, sandbags, provisions, clothing,
medical stores, hospital equipment, mules,
horses, fodder, even water to drink, for the
land produced not even that. These military
supplies had to be arranged in boats and
42 Galllpoli
lighters in such a way that they might be thrust
ashore with many thousands of men in all haste
but without confusion. All this world of
preparation, which made each unit landed a
self-supporting army, took time and labour,
how much can only be judged by those who
have done similar work.
On Friday, the 23rd of April, the weather
cleared so that the work could be begun. In
fine weather in Mudros a haze of beauty comes
upon the hills and water till their loveliness
is unearthly it is so rare. Then the bay is
like a blue jewel, and the hills lose their sav-
agery* an d glow, and are gentle, and the sun
comes up from Troy, and the peaks of Sa-
mothrace change colour, and all the marvellous
ships in the harbour are transfigured. The
land of Lemnos was beautiful with flowers at
that season, in the brief ^Egean spring, and
to seawards always, in the bay, were the ships,
more ships, perhaps, than any port of modern
times has known; they seemed like half the
ships of the world. In this crowd of ship-
ping, strange beautiful Greek vessels passed,
Gallipoli 43
under rigs of old time, with sheep and goats
and fish, for sale, and the tugs of the [Thames
and Mersey met again the ships they had towed
of old, bearing a new freight, of human cour-
age. The transports (all painted black) lay
in tiers, well within the harbour, the men of
war nearer Mudros and the entrance. Now in
all that city of ships, so busy with passing picket-
boats, and noisy with the labour of men, the
getting of the anchors began. Ship after ship,
crammed with soldiers, moved slowly out of
harbour, in the lovely day, and felt again the
heave of the sea. No such gathering of fine
ships has ever been seen upon this earth, and
the beauty and the exaltation of the youth
upon them made them like sacred things as
they moved away. All the thousands of men
aboard them, gathered on deck to see, till each
rail was thronged. These men had come from
all parts of the British world, from Africa,
Australia, Canada, India, the Mother Coun-
try, New Zealand and remote islands in the
sea. They had said good-bye to home that
they might offer^ their lives in the cause we
44 Gallipoli
stand for. In a few hours at most, as they
well knew, perhaps a tenth of them would have
looked their last on the sun, and be a part of
foreign earth or dumb things that the tides
push. Many of them would have disappeared
forever from the knowledge of man, blotted
from the book of life none would know how,
by a fall or chance shot in the darkness, in
the blast of a shell, or alone, like a hurt beast,
in some scrub or gully, far from comrades and
the English speech and the English singing.
And perhaps a third of them would be mangled,
blinded or broken, lamed, made imbecile or dis-
figured, with the colour and the taste of life
taken from them, so that they would never
more move with comrades nor exult in the sun.
And those not taken thus would be under the
ground, sweating in the trench, carrying sand-
bags up the sap, dodging death and danger,
without rest or food or drink, in the blazing
sun or the frost of the Gallipoli night, till
death seemed relaxation and a wound a lux-
ury. But as they moved out these things were
but the end they asked, the reward they had
Gallipoli 45
come for, the unseen cross upon the breast.
All that they felt was a gladness of exultation
that their young courage was to be used. They
went like kings in a pageant to the imminent
death.
As they passed from moorings to the man-
of-war anchorage on their way to the sea,
their feeling that they had done with life and
were going out to something new, welled up
in those battalions; they cheered and cheered
till the harbour rang with cheering. As each
ship crammed with soldiers drew near the bat-
tleships, the men swung their caps and cheered
again, and the sailors answered, and the noise
of cheering swelled, and the men in the ships
not yet moving joined in, and the men ashore,
till all the life in the harbour was giving
thanks that it could go to death rejoicing. All
was beautiful in that gladness of men about to
die, but the most moving thing was the great-
ness of their generous hearts. As they passed
the French ships, the memory of old quarrels
healed, and the sense of what sacred France
has done and endured, in this great war, and
46 Gallipoli
the pride of having such men as the French for
comrades, rose up in their warm souls, and
they cheered the French ships more, even, than
their own.
They left the harbour very, very slowly; this
tumult of cheering lasted a long time; no one
who heard it will ever forget it, or think of it
unshaken. It broke the hearts of all there
with pity and pride : it went beyond the guard
of the English heart. Presently all were out,
and the fleet stood across for Tenedos, and the
sun went down with marvellous colour, light-
ing island after island and the Asian peaks,
and those left behind in Mudros trimmed their
lamps knowing that they had been for a little
brought near to the heart of things.
The next day, the 24th April, the troops of
the landing parties went on board the war-
ships and mine-sweepers which were to take
them ashore. At midnight the fleet got under
way from Tenedos and stood out for the Pen-
insula. Dawn was to be at five, the landings
on the flanks were to take place then, the others
Gallipoli 47
at half-past five, after the fleet had bombarded
the beaches. Very few of the soldiers of the
landing parties slept that night; the excitement
of the morrow kept them awake, as happened
to Nelson's sailors before Trafalgar. It was
a very still fine night, slightly hazy, with a sea
so still that the ships had no trouble with their
long tows of boats and launches. As it began
to grow light the men went down into the boats,
and the two flanking parties started for the
outer beaches S and Y. The guns of the fleet
now opened a heavy fire upon the Turkish posi-
tions and the big guns on the Asian shore sent
over a few shell in answer; but the Turks near
the landing places reserved their fire. During
the intense bombardment by the fleet, when the
ships were trembling like animals with the
blasts of the explosions, the picket boats tow-
ing the lighters went ahead and the tow-loads
of crowded men started for the main landings
on beaches V, W and X.
It was now light, and the haze on Sedd-el-
Bahr was clearing away so that those in charge
of the boats could see what they were doing.
48 Gallipoli
Had they attempted an attack in the dark on
those unsurveyed beaches among the fierce and
dangerous tide rips the loss of life would have
been very great. As it was, the exceeding
fierceness of the currents added much to the
difficulty and danger of the task. We will take
the landings in succession.
The Landing at V Beach, near Sedd-el-Bahr.
The men told off for this landing were:
The Dublin Fusiliers, the Munster Fusiliers,
half a battalion of the Hampshire Regiment,
and the West Riding Field Company.
Three companies of the Dublin Fusiliers
were to land from towed lighters, the rest of
the party from a tramp steamer, the collier
River Clyde. This ship, a conspicuous sea-
mark at Cape Helles throughout the rest of the
campaign, had been altered to carry and land
troops. Great gangways or entry ports had
been cut in her sides on the level of her be-
tween decks, and platforms had been built out
upon her sides below these, so that men might
run from her in a hurry. The plan was to
Gallipoli 49
beach her as near the shore as possible, and
then drag or sweep the lighters, which she
towed, into position between her and the shore,
so as to make a kind of boat bridge from her to
the beach. When the lighters were so moored
as to make this bridge, the entry ports were
to be opened, the waiting troops were to rush
out on to the external platforms, run from
them on to the lighters and so to the shore.
The ship's upper deck and bridge were pro-
tected with boiler plate and sandbags, and a
casement for machine guns was built upon her
foVsle, so that she might reply to the enemy's
fire.
Five picket-boats, each towing five boats or
launches full of men, steamed alongside the
River Clyde and went ahead when she
grounded. She took the ground rather to the
right of the little beach, some 400 yards from
the ruins of Sedd-el-Bahr castle, before the
Turks had opened fire, but almost as she
grounded, when the picket-boats with their
tows were ahead of her, only twenty or thirty
yards from the beach, every rifle and machine
50 Gallipoli
gun in the castle, the town above it, and in
the curved low strongly trenched hill along the
bay, began a murderous fire upon ship and
boats. There was no question of their miss-
ing. They had their target on the front and
both flanks at ranges between 100 and 300
yards in clear daylight, thirty boats bunched
together and crammed with men and a good
big ship. The first outbreak of fire made the
bay as white as a rapid, for the Turks fired not
less than ten thousand shots a minute for the
first few minutes of that attack. Those not
killed in the boats at the first discharge jumped
overboard to wade or swim ashore, many were
killed in the water, many, who were wounded,
were swept away and drowned, others, trying
to swim in the fierce current, were drowned by
the weight of their equipment; but some
reached the shore, and these instantly doubled
out to cut the wire entanglements, and were
killed, or dashed for the cover of a bank of
sand or raised beach which runs along the
curve of the bay. Those very few who reached
this cover were out of immediate danger, but
Gallipoli 5 1
they were only a handful. The boats were de-
stroyed where they grounded.
Meanwhile, the men of the River Clyde
tried to make their bridge of boats, by sweep-
ing the lighters into position and mooring
them between the ship and the shore. They
were killed as they worked, but others took
their places, the bridge was made, and some
of the Munsters dashed along it from the ship
and fell in heaps as they ran. As a second
company followed, the moorings of the light-
ers broke or were shot, the men leaped into
the water and were drowned or killed, or
reached the beach and were killed, or fell
wounded there, and lay under fire getting
wound after wound till they died; very, very
few reached the sandbank. More brave men
jumped aboard the lighters to remake the
bridge. They were swept away or shot to
pieces; the average life on those boats was some
three minutes long, but they remade the bridge,
and the third company of the Munsters doubled
down to death along it under a storm of shrap-
nel which scarcely a man survived. The big
52 Gallipoli
guns in Asia were now shelling the River
Clyde, and the hell of rapid fire never paused.
More men tried to land, headed by Brigadier
General Napier, who was instantly killed, with
nearly all his followers. Then for long hours
the remainder stayed on board, down below in
the grounded steamer, while the shots beat on
her plates with a rattling clang which never
stopped. Her twelve machine guns fired back,
killing any Turk who showed, but nothing could
be done to support the few survivors of the
landing, who now lay under cover of the sand-
bank on the other side of the beach. It was al-
most certain death to try to leave the ship, but
all through the day men leaped from her (with
leave or without it) to bring water or succour to
the wounded on the boats or beach. A hun-
dred brave men gave their lives thus: every
man there earned the Cross that day: a boy
earned it by one of the bravest deeds of the war,
leaping into the sea with a rope in his teeth to
try to secure a drifting lighter.
The day passed thus, but at nightfall the
Turks' fire paused, and the men came ashore
Gallipoli 53
from the River Clyde, almost unharmed. They
joined the survivors on the beach and at once
attacked the old fort and the village above it.
[These works were strongly held by the enemy.
All had been ruined by the fire from the fleet,
but in the rubble and ruin of old masonry
there were thousands of hidden riflemen backed
by machine guns. Again and again they beat
off our attacks, for there was a bright moon
and they knew the ground, and our men had
to attack uphill over wire and broken earth
and heaped stones in all the wreck and con-
fusion and strangeness of war at night in a
new place. Some of the Dublins and Munsters
went astray in the ruins, and were wounded
far from their fellows and so lost. The Turks
became more daring after dark; while the light
lasted they were checked by the River Clyde's
machine guns, but at midnight they gathered
unobserved and charged. They came right
down onto the beach, and in the darkness and
moonlight much terrible and confused fighting
followed. Many were bayoneted, many shot,
there was wild firing and crying, and then the
54 Gallipoli
Turk attack melted away, and their machine
guns began again. When day dawned, the sur-
vivors of the landing party were crouched
under the shelter of the sandbank; they had
had no rest; most of them had been fighting all
night, all had landed across the corpses of their
friends. No retreat was possible, nor was it
dreamed of, but to stay there was hopeless.
Lieutenant Colonel Doughty-Wylie gathered
them together for an attack: the fleet opened a
terrific fire upon the ruins of the fort and vil-
lage, and the landing party went forward again,
fighting from bush to bush and from stone to
stone, till the ruins were in their hands. Shells
still fell among them, single Turks, lurking un-
der cover, sniped them and shot them, but the
landing had been made good, and V beach was
secured to us.
This was the worst and the bloodiest of all
the landings.
The Landing at W Beach, under Cape Tekke.
The men told off for this landing were the
1st Battalion Lancashire Fusiliers, supported
(later) by the Worcester Regiment.
Gallipot? 55
The men were landed at six in the morning
from ships' boats run ashore by picket boats.
On landing, they rushed the wire entanglements,
broke through them, with heavy loss, and won
to the dead ground under the cliffs. The ships
drew nearer to the beach and opened heavy
fire upon the Turks, and the landing party
stormed the cliffs and won the trenches.
The Worcester Regiment having landed, at-
tempts were made to break a way to the right,
so as to join hands with the men on V Beach.
All the land between the two beaches was
heavily wired and so broken that it gave much
cover to the enemy. Many brave Worcesters
went out to cut the wires and were killed; the
fire was intense, there was no getting further.
The trenches already won were secured and
improved, the few available reserves were hur-
ried up, and by dark, when the Turks attacked,
again and again, in great force, our men were
able to beat them off, and hold on to what they
had won.
56 Gallipoli
The Landing at X Beach (Sometimes called /w-
placable Landing), towards Krithia.
[The men told off for this landing were the
1st Royal Fusiliers, with a working party of
the Anson Battalion, R. N. D.
These men were towed ashore from H. M. S.
Implacable about an hour after dawn. The
ship stood close in to the beach and opened
rapid fire on the enemy trenches: under cover
of this fire the men got ashore fairly easily.
On moving inland they were attacked by a great
force of Turks and checked; but they made
good the ground won, and opened up communi-
cations with the Lancashires who had landed
at W Beach. This landing was the least
bloody of all.
Of the two flank landings, that on the right,
within the Straits, to the right of Sedd-el-Bahr,
got ashore without great loss and held on;
that on the left, to the left of X Beach, got
ashore, fought a desperate and bloody battle
against five times its strength, and finally had to
re-embark. The men got ashore upon a cliff
Galllpoli 57
so steep that the Turks had not troubled to
defend it, but on landing they were unable to
link up with the men on X Beach as had been
planned. They were attacked in great force
by an ever-growing Turkish army, fought all
day and all through the night in such trenches
as they had been able to dig under fire, and at
last in the morning of the next day went down
the cliffs and re-embarked, most nobly covered
to the end by a party from the King's Own Scot-
tish Borderers and the Plymouth Battalion.
During the forenoon of the 25th, a regiment
of the French Corps landed at Kum Kale, un-
der cover of the guns of the French warships,
and engaged the enemy throughout the day
and night. Their progress was held up by a
strongly entrenched force during the afternoon,
and after sharp fighting all through the night
they re-embarked in the forenoon of the 26th
with some 400 Turkish prisoners. This land-
ing of the French diverted from us on the 25th
the fire of the howitzers emplaced on the Asi-
atic shore. Had these been free to fire upon
us, the landings near Sedd-el-Bahr would have
58 Gallipoli
been made even more hazardous than they
were.
At Bulair one man, Lieutenant Freyberg,
swam ashore from a Destroyer, towing a little
raft of flares. Near the shore he lit two of
these flares, then, wading onto the land, he lit
others at intervals along the coast, then he wan-
dered inland, naked, on a personal reconnais-
sance, and soon found a large Turkish army
strongly entrenched. Modesty forbade further
intrusion. He went back to the beach and
swam off to his Destroyer, could not find her in
the dark, and swam for several miles, was ex-
hausted and cramped, and was at last picked
up, nearly dead. This magnificent act of cour-
age and endurance, done by one unarmed man,
kept a large Turkish army at Bulair during the
critical hours of the landing. " The Constan-
tinople papers were filled with accounts of the
repulse of the great attack at Bulair." The
flares deceived the Turks even more completely
than had been hoped.
While these operations were securing our
hold upon the extreme end of the Peninsula,
Gallipoli 59
the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps
were making good their landing on the ^Egean
coast, to the north of Gaba Tepe. They sailed
from Mudros on the 24th, arrived off the coast
of the Peninsula at about half-past one on the
morning of the 25th, and there under a setting
moon, in calm weather, they went on board the
boats which were to take them ashore. At
about half-past three the tows left the ships
and proceeded in darkness to the coast.
Gaba or Kaba Tepe is a steep cliff or prom-
ontory about 70 feet high with a whitish nose
and something the look of a blunt-nosed tor-
pedo or porpoise. It is a forbidding-looking
snout of land, covered with scrub where it is
not too steep for roots to hold, and washed by
deep water. About a mile to the north of it
there is a possible landing place, and north of
that again a long and narrow strip of beach
between two little headlands. This latter
beach cannot be seen from Gaba Tepe. The
ground above these beaches is exceedingly steep
sandy cliff, broken by two great gulleys or ra-
vines, which run inland. All the ground, ex-
60 Gallipoli
cept in one patch in the southern ravine, where
there is a sort of meadow of grass, is densely
covered with scrub, mostly between two and
three feet high. Inland from the beach, the
land of the Peninsula rises in steep, broken hills
and spurs, with clumps of pine upon them, and
dense undergrowths of scrub. The men se-
lected for this landing were the 3rd Brigade
of the Australian and New Zealand Army
Corps, followed and supported by the ist and
2nd Brigades.
The place selected for the landing was the
southern beach and nearer of the two to Gaba
Tepe. This, like the other landing places near
Cape Helles, was strongly defended, and most
difficult of approach. Large forces of Turks
were entrenched there, well prepared. But in
the darkness of the early morning after the
moon had set the tows stood a little further
to the north than they should have done, per-
haps because some high ground to their left
made a convenient steering mark against the
stars. They headed in towards the northern
beach between the two little headlands, where
Gallipoli 6 1
the Turks were not expecting them. How-
ever, they were soon seen and very heavy in-
dependent rifle fire was concentrated on them.
As they neared the beach " about one battalion
of Turks " doubled along the land to intercept
them. These men came from nearer Gaba
Tepe, firing as they ran, into the mass of the
boats at short range. A great many men were
killed in the boats, but the dead men's oars
were taken by survivors, and the boats forced
into the shingle. The men jumped out, waded
ashore, charged the enemy with the bayonet,
and broke the Turk attack to pieces. The
Turks scattered and were pursued, and now
the steep scrub-covered cliffs became the scene
of the most desperate fighting.
The scattered Turks dropped into the scrub
and disappeared. Hidden all over the rough
cliffs, under every kind of cover, they sniped
the beach or ambushed the little parties of
the 3rd Brigade who had rushed the landing.
All over the broken hills there were isolated
fights to the death, men falling into gullies and
being bayoneted, sudden duels, point blank,
62 Gallipoli
where men crawling through the scrub met
each other and life went to the quicker finger,
'heroic deaths, where some half section which
had lost touch were caught by ten times their
strength and charged and died. No man of
our side knew that cracked and fissured jungle.
Men broke through it on to machine guns, or
showed up on a crest and were blown to pieces,
or leaped down from it into some sap or trench,
to catch the bombs flung at them and hurl them
at the thrower. Going as they did, up cliffs,
through scrub, over ground which would have
broken the alignment of the Tenth Legion,
they passed many hidden Turks, who were thus
left to shoot them in the back or to fire down
at the boats, from perhaps only fifty yards
away. It was only just light, theirs was the
first British survey of that wild country; only
now, as it showed up clear, could they realise
its difficulty. They pressed on up the hill.
They dropped and fired and died; they drove
the Turks back, they flung their packs away,
wormed through the bush and stalked the snip-
ers from the flash. As they went, the words
Gallipoli 63
of their song supported them, the ribald and
proud chorus of " Australia will be there,"
which the men on the torpedoed Southland
sang, as they fell in, expecting death. Pres-
ently, as it grew lighter, the Turks' big howitz-
ers began shelling the beach, and their field
guns, well-hidden, opened on the transports
now busy disembarking the ist and 2nd Bri-
gades. They forced the transports to stand
further out to sea, and shelled the tows, as
they came in, with shrapnel and high explosive.
As the boats drew near the shore every gun on
Gaba Tepe took them in flank and the snipers
concentrated on them from the shore. More
and more Turks were coming up at the double
to stop the attack up the hill. The fighting in
the scrub grew fiercer; shells burst continually
upon the beach, boats were sunk, men were
killed in the water. The boatmen and beach-
working-parties were the unsung heroes of that
landing. The boatmen came in with the tows,
under fire, waited with them under intense and
concentrated fire of every kind, until they were
unloaded, and then shoved off, and put slowly
64 Gallipoli
back for more* and then came back again.
The beach parties were wading to and from
that shell-smitten beach all day, unloading,
carrying ashore and sorting the munitions and
necessaries for many thousands of men. They
worked in a strip of beach and sea from 500
yards long by 40 broad, and the fire directed
on that strip was such that every box brought
ashore had one or more shells and not less than
fifty bullets directed at it before it was flung
upon the sand. More men came in and went
on up the hill in support; but as yet there were
no guns ashore, and the Turks' fire became in-
tenser. By ten o'clock the Turks had had time
to bring up enough men from their prepared
positions to hold up the advance. Scattered
parties of our men who had gone too far in
the scrub, were cut off and killed, for there was
no thought of surrender in those marvellous
young men; they were the flower of this world's
manhood, and died as they had lived, owning
no master on this earth. More and more
Turks came up with big and field artillery, and
now our attack had to hold on to what It had
Gallipoli 65
won, against more than twice its numbers. We
had won a rough bow of ground, in which the
beach represented the bow string, the beach
near Gaba Tepe the south end, and the hovel
known as Fisherman's Hut the north. Against
this position, held by at most 8,000 of our men,
who had had no rest and had fought hard since
dawn, under every kind of fire in a savage
rough country unknown to them, came an over-
whelming army of Turks to drive them into the
sea. For four hours the Turks attacked and
again attacked, with a terrific fire of artillery
and waves of men in succession. They came
fresh, from superior positions, with many guns,
to break a disorganised line of breathless men
not yet dug in. L The guns of the ships opened
on them, and the scattered units in the scrub
rolled them back again and again by rifle and
machine gun fire, and by charge after counter-
charge. More of the Army Corps landed to
meet the Turks, the fire upon the beach never
slackened, and they came ashore across corpses
and wrecked boats and a path like a road in
hell with ruin and blasts and burning. They
66 GalUpoli
went up the cliff to their fellows under an ever-
growing fire, that lit the scrub and burned the
wounded and the dead. Darkness came, but
there was no rest nor lull. Wave after wave
of Turks came out of the night, crying the
proclamation of their faith; others stole up in
the dark through the scrub and shot or stabbed
and crept back, or were seen and stalked and
killed. Flares went up, to light with their blue
and ghastly glare the wild glens peopled by
the enemy. Men worked at the digging-in till
they dropped asleep upon the soil, and more
Turks charged and they woke and fired and
again dug. It was cruelly cold after the sun
had gone, but there was no chance of warmth
or proper food; to dig-in and beat back the
Turk or die was all that men could think of.
In the darkness, among the blasts of the shells,
men scrambled up and down the pathless cliffs
bringing up tins of water and boxes of cart-
ridges, hauling up guns and shells, and bring-
ing down the wounded. The beach was heaped
with wounded, placed as close under the cliff
as might be, in such yard or so of dead ground
Gallipoli 67
as the cliffs gave. The doctors worked among
them and shells fell among them and doctors
and wounded were blown to pieces, and the sur-
vivors sang their song of " Australia will be
there/' and cheered the newcomers still land-
ing on the beach. Sometimes our fire seemed
to cease and then the Turk shells filled the
night with their scream and blast and the pat-
tering of their fragments. With all the fury
and the crying of the shells, and the shouts and
cries and cursing on the beach, the rattle of the
small arms and the cheers and defiance up the
hill, and the roar of the great guns far away,
at sea, or in the olive groves, the night seemed
in travail of a new age. All the blackness was
shot with little spurts of fire, and streaks of
fire, and malignant bursts of fire, and arcs and
glows and crawling snakes of fire, and the moon
rose, and looked down upon it all. In the
fiercer hours of that night shells fell in that con-
tested mile of ground and on the beach beyond
it at the rate of one a second, and the air whim-
pered with passing bullets, or fluttered with the
rush of the big shells, or struck the head of
68 Gallipoli
the passer like a moving wall with the shock
of the explosion. All through the night, the
Turks attacked, and in the early hours their
fire of shrapnel became so hellish that the Aus-
tralians soon had not men enough left to hold
the line. Orders were given to fall back to a
shorter line, but in the darkness, uproar and
confusion, with many sections refusing to fall
back, others falling back and losing touch,
others losing their way in gully or precipice, and
shrapnel hailing on all, as it had hailed for
hours, the falling back was mistaken by some
for an order to re-embark. Many men who
had lost their officers and non-commissioned of-
ficers fell back to the beach, where the confu-
sion of wounded men, boxes of stores, field
dressing stations, corpses and the litter and the
waste of battle, had already blocked the going.
The shells bursting in this clutter made the
beach, in the words of an eye-witness, " like
bloody hell and nothing else." But at this
breaking of the wave of victory, this panting
moment in the race, when some of the runners
had lost their first wind, encouragement reached
Galllpoli 69
our men: a message came to the beach from Sir
Ian Hamilton, to say that help was coming,
and that an Australian submarine had entered
the Narrows and had sunk a Turkish transport
off Chanak.
This word of victory, coming to men who
thought for the moment that their efforts had
been made in vain, had the effect of a fresh bri-
gade. The men rallied back up the hill; bear-
ing the news to the firing-line, the new, con-
stricted line was made good, and the rest of
the night was never anything but continued vic-
tory to those weary ones in the scrub. But
24 hours of continual battle exhausts men, and
by dawn the Turks, knowing the weariness of
our men, resolved to beat them down into the
sea. When the sun was well in our men's
eyes they attacked again, with not less than
twice our entire strength of fresh men, and with
an overwhelming superiority in field artillery.
Something in the Turk commander and the
knowledge that a success there would bring our
men across the peninsula within a day, made
the Turks more desperate enemies there than
70 Galllpoll
elsewhere. They came at us with a determina-
tion which might have triumphed against other
troops. As they came on they opened a ter-
rific fire of shrapnel upon our position, pouring
in such a hail that months afterwards one could
see their round shrapnel bullets stuck in bare
patches of ground, or in earth thrown up from
the trenches, as thickly as plums in a pudding.
Their multitudes of men pressed through the
scrub as skirmishers, and sniped at every mov-
ing thing; for they were on higher ground and
could see over most of our position, and every
man we had was under direct fire for hours
of each day. As the attack developed, the
promised help arrived, our warships stood in
and opened on the Turks with every gun that
would bear. Some kept down the guns of
Gaba Tepe, others searched the line of the
Turk advance, till the hills over which they
came were swathed with yellow smoke and dust,
the white clouds of shrapnel, and the drifting
darkness of conflagration. All the scrub was
in a blaze before them, but they pressed on,
falling in heaps and lines; and their guns
Gallipoli 71
dropped a never-ceasing rain of shells on
trenches, beach and shipping. . The landing of
stores and ammunition never ceased during the
battle. The work of the beach-parties in that
scene of burning and massacre was beyond all
praise: so was the work of the fatigue parties
who passed up and down the hill with water,
ammunition and food, or dug sheltered roads
to the trenches; so was the work of the Medical
Service, who got the wounded out of cuts in the
earth, so narrow and so twisted that there was
no using a stretcher and men had to be carried
on stretcher bearers' backs or on improvised
chairs made out of packing cases.
At a little before noon the Turk attack
reached its height in a blaze and uproar of
fire, and the swaying forward of their multi-
tudes. The guns of the warships swept them
from flank to flank with every engine of death:
they died by hundreds, and the attack withered
as it came. Our men saw the enemy fade and
slacken and halt; then with their cheer they
charged him and beat him home, seized new
ground from him, and dug themselves in in
72 Gallipoli
front of him. All through the day there was
fighting up and down the line, partial attacks,
and never-ceasing shell-fire, but no other great
attack, the Turks had suffered too much. At
night their snipers came out in the scrub and
shot at anything they could see, and all night
long their men dragged up field guns and piles
of shrapnel, and worked at the trenches which
were to contain ours. When day dawned, they
opened with shrapnel upon the beach, with a
feu de barrage designed to stop all landing of
men and stores. They whipped the bay with
shrapnel bullets. Where their fire was concen-
trated, the water was lashed as with hail all
day long; but the boats passed through it, and
men worked in it, building jetties for the boats
to land at, using a big Turk shell as a pile
driver: when they got too hot they bathed in
it, for no fire shook those men. It was said,
that when a big shell was coming, men of other
races would go into their dugouts, but that these
men paused only to call it a bastard and then
went on with their work.
By the night of the second day, the Aus-
Gallipoli 73
tralian and New Zealand Army Corps had won
and fortified their position. Men writing or
reporting on service about them referred to
them as the A. N. Z. A. C, and these letters
soon came to mean the place in which they were,
un-named till then, probably, save by some
rough Turkish place-name, but now likely to
be printed on all English maps, with the other
names, of Brighton Beach and Hell Spit, which
mark a great passage of arms.
Ill
King Marsilies parted his army: ten columns he
kept by him, and the other ten rode in to fight. The
Franks said : " God, what ruin we shall have here.
What will become of the twelve Peers? " The Arch-
bishop Turpin answered first: "Good knights, you
are the friends of God; to-day you will be crowned
and flowered, resting in the holy flowers of Paradise,
where no coward will ever come."
The Franks answered : " We will not fail. If it
be God's will, we will not murmur. We will fight
against our enemies: we are few men, but well-hard-
ened."
They spurred forward to fight the pagans. The
Franks and Saracens are mingled.
The Song of Roland.
THIS early fighting, which lasted from dawn
on the 2 fth April till noon on the following
day, won us a footing, not more than that, on
the Peninsula; it settled the German brag that
we should never be able to land. We had
landed upon, had taken, and were holding the
whole of the southwestern extremity of the
Peninsula and a strip of the ^Egean coast, in
the face of an army never less than twice our
strength, strongly entrenched and well supplied.
We had lost very heavily in the attack, our
men were weary from the exceedingly severe
service of the landing, but the morrow began
the second passage in the campaign, the advance
from the sea, before the Turks should have re-
covered.
Many have said to me, with a naivete that
would be touching if it were not so plainly in-
spired by our enemies: "Why did not the
troops press on at once, the day they landed?
The Japanese pressed on the day they landed,
77
78 Galllpoli
so did the Americans in Cuba. If you had
pressed on at once, you would have won the
whole Peninsula. The Turks were at their last
cartridge, and would have surrendered."
It is quite true that the Japanese moved in-
land immediately from their transports at
Chemulpho and Chinampo. Those ports were
seized before the Russians knew that war was
declared: they were not defended by Russian
soldiers, and the two small Russian cruisers
caught there by the Japanese fleet were put out
of action before the transports discharged.
The Japanese were free to land as they chose
on beaches prepared, not with machine guns
and mines, but with cranes, gangways and good
roads. Even so, they did not press on. The
Japanese do not press on unless they are at-
tacking: they are as prudent as they are brave:
they waited till they were ready and then
marched on. The Americans landed at Dai-
quiri and at Guanica unopposed and in neither
case engaged the enemy till next day.
In the preceding chapter I have tried to show
why we did not press on at once, after land-
Gallipoli 79
ing. We did not, because we could not, be-
cause two fresh men strongly entrenched, with
machine guns, will stop one tired man with a
rifle in nine cases out of ten. Our men had
done the unimaginable in getting ashore at all,
they could not do the impossible on the same
day. I used to say this, to draw the answer,
" Well, other troops would have done it," so
that I might say, what I know to be the truth,
that no other men on this earth either would
have or could have made good the landing;
and that the men have not yet been born who
could have advanced after such a feat of arms.
The efforts of men are limited by their
strength: the strength of men, always easily
exhausted, is the only strength at the disposal
of a general, it is the money to be spent by
him in the purchase of victory, whether by
hours of marching in the mud, digging in the
field, or in attack. Losses in attack are great,
though occasional, losses from other causes
are great and constant. All armies in the field
have to be supplied constantly with fresh drafts
to make good the losses from attack and ex-
8o Gallipoli
haustion. No armies can move without these
replenishments, just as no individual men can
go on working, after excessive labour, without
rest and food. Our losses in the landings were
severe, even for modern war, even for the
Dardanelles. The bloodiest battle of modern
times is said to have been Antietam or Sharps-
burg, in the American Civil War, where the
losses were perhaps nearly one-third of the
men engaged. At V Beach the Munsters lost
more than one-third, and the Dublins more
than three-fifths of their total strength. The
Lancashires at W Beach lost nearly as heavily
as the Dublins. At Anzac, one Australian bat-
talion lost 422 out of 900. At X Beach, the
Royals lost 487 out of 979. All these battal-
ions had lost more than half their officers, in-
deed by the 28th April the Dublins had only
one officer left. How could these dwindled
battalions press on?
[Then for the individual exhaustion. Those
engaged in the first landing were clambering
and fighting in great heat, without proper food,
and in many cases without water, for the first
Gallipoli 8 1
24 or 36 hours, varying the fighting with hur-
ried but deep digging in marl or clay, getting
no sleep, nor any moment's respite from the
peril of death. Then, at the end of the first
phase, when the fact that they had won the
landing was plain, some of these same men,
unrested, improperly fed, and wet through
with rain, sweat and the sea, had to hold what
they had won, while the others went down to
the beach to make piers, quarry roads, dig shel-
ters, and wade out to carry or drag on shore
food, drink, munitions and heavy guns, and to
do this without appliances, by the strength of
their arms. Then when these things had been
done almost to the limit of human endurance,
they carried water, food and ammuniton to the
tfenches, not in carts but on their backs, and
then relieved their fellows in the trenches and
withstood the Turk attacks and replied to the
Turks' fire for hours on end. At Anzac the
A. N. ZrArmy Corps had " 96 hours' continu-
ous fighting in the trenches with little or no
sleep " and " at no time during the 96 hours
did the Turks' firing cease, although it varied
82 Gallipoli
in volume; at times the fusillade was simply
deafening." Men worked like this, to the
limit of physical endurance, under every possi-
ble exposure to wet, heat, cold, death, hunger,
thirst and want of rest, become exhausted, and
their nerves shattered, not from fear, which
was a thing those men did not understand, but
because the machine breaks. On the top of the
misery, exhaustion and nerve-ceasing peril, is
" the dreadful anxiety of not knowing how the
battle is progressing," and the still worse anx-
iety of vigilance. To the strain of keeping
awake, when dead-beat, is added the strain of
watching men, peering for spies, stalking for
snipers and listening for bombing-parties. Un-
der all these strains the minds of strong men
give way. They are the intensest strains ever
put upon intelligences. Men subjected to them
for many hours at a time cannot at once " press
on," however brave their hearts may be.
Those who are unjust enough to think that they
can, or could, should work for a summer's day,
without food or drink, at digging, then work
for a night in the rain carrying heavy boxes,
Gallipoli 83
then dig for some hours longer, and at the end
ask me to fire a machine gun at them while they
" press on," across barbed wire, in what they
presume to be the proper manner.
Our men could not " press on " at once.
They had not enough unwounded men to do
more than hold the hordes of fresh Turks con-
tinually brought up against them. They had
no guns ashore to prepare an advance, nor
enough rifle ammunition to stand a siege.
[They had the rations in their packs and the
water in their bottles, and no other supplies
but the seven days' food, water and rifle ammu-
nition put into each boat at the landing. To
get men, stores, water and guns ashore, under
fire, on beaches without wharves, cranes or der-
ricks of any kind, takes time, and until men and
goods were landed no advance was possible.
Until then, our task was not to press on, but to
hang on, like grim death. It was for the
enemy to press on, to beat our tired troops be-
fore their supports could be landed, and this
the Turks very well understood, as their cap-
tured orders show, and as their behaviour
84 Gallipoli
showed only too clearly. During the days
which followed the landing, the Turks, far
from being at their last cartridge, and eager to
surrender, prevented our pressing on, by press-
ing on themselves, in immense force and with a
great artillery, till our men were dying of fa-
tigue in driving back their attacks.
One point more may be discussed, before re-
suming the story. The legend, " that the
Turks were at their last cartridge and would
have surrendered had we advanced," is very
widely spread abroad by German emissaries.
It appears in many forms, in print, in the lec-
ture and in conversation. Sometimes place and
date are given, sometimes the authority, all con-
fidently, but always differently. It is well to
state here the truth so that the lie may be
known. The Turks were never at the end of
their supplies. They were always better and
more certainly supplied with shells and cart-
ridges than we were. If they were ever (as
perhaps they sometimes were) rather short of
big gun ammunition, so were we. If they were
sometimes rather short of rifles and rifle am-
Gallipoli 85
munition, so were we. If they were often short
of food and all-precious water, so were we, and
more so, and doubly more so. For all our sup-
plies came over hundreds of miles of stormy
water infested by submarines and were landed
on open beaches under shell fire, and their sup-
plies came along the Asiatic coast and by ferry
across the Hellespont, and thence, in compara-
tive safety, by road to the trenches. The
Turkish army was well supplied, well equipped,
more numerous and in better positions than our
own. There was neither talk nor thought
among them at any time of surrender, nor could
there have been, in an army so placed and so
valiant. There was some little disaffection
among them. [They hated their German offi-
cers and the German methods of discipline so
much that many prisoners when taken expressed
pleasure at being taken, spat at the name of
German, and said " English good, German
bad." Some of this, however, may have been
Levantine tact.
Late on the 26th April, the French corps
landed men at V Beach and took the trenches
86 Gallipoli
on the right of the ground won, i.e., towards
the Straits. At noon the next day the whole
force advanced inland without much opposition,
for rather more than a mile. At nightfall on
the 27th, they held a line across the Peninsula
from the mouth of the Sighir watercourse (on
the ^Egean) to Eski Hissarlik (on the Straits).
The men were very weary from the incessant
digging of trenches, fighting, and dragging up of
stores from the beach. They dug themselves
in under shell and rifle fire, stood to their arms
to repel Turk attacks for most of the night, and
at eight next morning began the battle of the
28th of April. The French corps was on the
right. The 29th Division (with one battalion
of the R. N. Division), on the left. They ad-
vanced across rough moorland and little culti-
vated patches to attack the Turk town of
Krithia. All the ground over which they ad-
vanced gave cover of the best kind to the de-
fence. All through the morning, at odd times,
the creeping companies going over that broken
country came suddenly under the fire of ma-
chine guns, and lost men before they could
Gallipoli 87
fling themselves down. In the heather and
torrent-beds of the Scotch-looking moorland
the Turk had only to wait in cover till his
targets appeared, climbing a wall or getting out
of a gulley, then he could turn on his machine
guns, at six hundred shots a minute each, and
hold up the advance. From time to time the
Turks attacked in great numbers. Early in
the afternoon our advance reached its furthest
point, about three quarters of a mile from
Krithia. Our artillery, short of ammunition
at the best of times, and in these early days
short of guns, too, did what it could, though
it had only shrapnel, which is of small service
against an entrenched enemy. [Those who
were there have said that nothing depressed
them more than the occasional shells from our
guns in answer to the continual fire from the
Turk artillery. They felt themselves out-
gunned and without support. Rifle cartridges
were running short, for, in spite of desperate
efforts, in that roadless wild land with the
beaches jammed with dead, wounded, stores,
the wrecks of boats, and parties trying to build
88 Gallipoli
piers under shell-fire, it was not possible to
land or to send up cartridges in the quantity
needed. There were not yet enough mules
ashore to take the cartridge-boxes and men
could not be spared; there were too few men to
hold the line. Gradually our men fell back
a little from the ground they had won. The
Turks brought up more men, charged us, and
drove us back a little more, and were then
themselves held. Our men dug themselves in
as best they could and passed another anxious
night, in bitter cold and driving rain, staving
off a Turk attack, which was pressed with reso-
lute courage against our centre and the French
corps to the right of it. There were very
heavy losses on both sides, but the Turks were
killed in companies at every point of attack and
failed to drive us further.
The next two days were passed in compara-
tive quiet, in strengthening the lines, landing
men, guns and stores and preparing for the
next advance. This war has shown what an
immense reserve of shell is needed to prepare
a modern advance. Our men never had that
Gallipoli 89
immense reserve, nor, indeed a large reserve,
and in those early days they had no reserve at
all, but a day to day allowance, and before a
reserve was formed the Turks came down upon
us with every man and gun they had, in the des-
perate night attack of the ist of May. This
began with shell-fire at ten p. M., and was fol-
lowed half-an-hour later by a succession of
charges in close order. The Turk front ranks
crept up on hands and knees without firing
(their cartridges had been taken from them)
and charged our trenches with the bayonet.
They got into our trenches in the dark, bayo-
neted the men in them, broke our line, got
through to the second line and were there
mixed up in the night in a welter of killing and
firing beyond description. The moon had not
risen when the attack came home. The fight-
ing took place in the dark: men fired and
stabbed in all directions, at flashes, at shouts,
by the burning of the flares, by the coloured
lights of the Turk officers, and by the gleams
of the shells on our right. There were 9,000
Turks in the first line, 12,000 more behind
90 Gallipoli
them. They advanced yelling for God and
Enver Pasha, amid the roar of every gun and
rifle in range. They broke through the French,
were held, then driven back, then came again,
bore everything before them, and then met the
British supports and went no further. Our
supports charged the Turks and beat them
back; at dawn our entire line advanced and
beat them back in a rout, till their machine guns
stopped us.
Upon many of the dead Turks in front of
the French and English trenches were copies
of an address issued by a German officer, one
Von Zowenstern, calling on the Turks to de-
stroy the enemy, since their only hope of salva-
tion was to win the battle or die in the at-
tempt. On some bodies were other orders,
for the Mahometan priests to encourage the
men to advance, for officers to shoot those sol-
diers who hung back, and for prisoners to be
left with the reserves, not taken to the rear.
In this early part of the campaign there were
many German officers in the Turkish army.
In these early night attacks they endeavoured
Gallipoli 91
to confuse our men by shouting orders to them
in English. One, on the day of the landing,
walked up to one of the trenches of the 29th
Division and cried out, " Surrender, you Eng-
lish, we ten to one." " He was thereupon hit
on the head with a spade by a man who was im-
proving his trench with it."
This battle never ceased for five days.
The artillery was never silent. Our men were
shelled, sniped and shrapnelled every day and
all day long, and at night the Turks attacked
with the bayonet. By the evening of the 5th
May the 29th Division, which had won the
end of the Peninsula, had been reduced by one-
half and its officers by two-thirds. The pro-
portion of officers to men in a British battalion
is as one to thirty-seven, but in the list of killed
the proportion was as one to eleven. The offi-
cers of that wonderful company poured out
their lives like water; they brought their weary
men forward hour after hour in all that sleep-
less ten days, and at the end led them on once
more in the great attack of the 6th-8th of May.
This attack was designed to push the Allied
92 Galli poll
lines further forward into the Peninsula, so
as to win a little more ground, and ease the
growing congestion on the beaches near Cape
Helles. The main Turkish position lay on and
about the hump of Achi Baba, and on the high
ground stretching down from it. It was hoped
that even if Achi Baba could not be carried, the
ground below him, including the village of
Krithia, might be taken. The movement was
to be a general advance, with the French on
the right attacking the high ground nearer to
the Straits, the 29th Division on the left, be-
tween the French and the sea, attacking the
slowly sloping ground which leads past Krithia
up to Achi Baba. Krithia stands high upon the
slope, among orchards and gardens, and makes
a good artillery target, but the slope on which
it stands, being much broken, covered with
dense scrub (some of it thorny) and with
clumps of trees, is excellent for defence. The
Turks had protected that square mile of ground
with many machine guns and trenches so skil-
fully concealed that they could not be seen
either from close in front or from aero-
Gallipoli 93
planes. The French line of attack was over
ground equally difficult, but steeper, and there-
fore giving more " dead ground," or patches
upon which no direct fire can be turned by the
defence. The line of battle from the French
right to the English left stretched right across
the Peninsula with a front (owing to bends
and salients) of about five miles. It was nearly
everywhere commanded by the guns of Achi
Baba, and in certain places the enemy batteries
on the Turk left, near the Straits, could enfilade
it. Our men were weary but the Turks were
expecting strong reinforcements; the attack
could not be delayed.
Few people who have not seen modern war
can understand what it is like. They look at
a map, which is a small flat surface, and find
it difficult to believe that a body of men could
have had difficulty in passing from one point
upon it to another. They think that they them-
selves would have found no difficulty, that they
would not have been weary nor thirsty, the dis-
tance demanded of them being only a mile,
possibly a mile and a quarter, and the reward
94 Gallipoli
a very great one. They think that troops who
failed to pass across that mile must have been
in some way wanting, and that had they been
there, either in command or in the attack, the
results would have been different.
One can only answer, that in modern war it is
not easy to carry a well-defended site by direct
attack. In modern war, you may not know, till
fire breaks out upon you, where the defence,
which you have to attack, is hidden. You may
not know (in darkness, in a strange land) more
than vaguely which is your " front," and you
may pass by your enemy, or over him, or under
him without seeing him. You may not see your
enemy at all. You may fight for days and
never see an enemy. In modern war troops see
no enemy till he attacks them; then, in most
cases if they are well entrenched with many
guns behind them, they can destroy him.
The Allied officers, looking through their
field glasses at the ground to be attacked, could
see only rough, sloping ground, much gullied,
much overgrown, with a few clumps of trees, a
few walls, orchards and houses, but no guns, no
Gallipoli 95
trenches, no enemy. Aeroplanes scouting over
the Turks could see men but not the trenches
nor the guns, they could only report that they
suspected them to be in such a place. Some-
times in the mornings men would notice that
the earth was turned newly on some bare patch
on the hill, but none could be sure that this dig-
ging was not a ruse to draw fire. The trenches
were hidden cunningly, often with a head-cover
of planks so strewn with earth and planted with
scrub as to be indistinguishable from the ground
about. [The big guns were coloured cunningly,
like a bird or snake upon the ground. From
above in an aeroplane an observer could not pick
them out so as to be certain, if they were not
in action at the time. Brave men scouting for-
ward at night to reconnoitre brought back some
information, but not more than enough to show
that the Turks were there in force. No man in
the Allied Army expected less than a desperate
battle; no officer in the world could have made
it anything but that, with all the odds against
us. Nothing could be done but cover the
Turk position with the fire of every gun on
96 Gallipoli
shore or in the ships and then send the men for-
ward, to creep or dash as far as they could,
and then dig themselves in.
Let the reader imagine himself to be facing
three miles of any very rough broken sloping
ground known to him, ground for the most part
gorse-thyme-and-scrub-covered, being poor soil,
but in some places beautiful with flowers (es-
pecially " a spiked yellow flower with a whitish
leaf") and on others green from cultivation.
Let him say to himself that he and an army of
his friends are about to advance up the slope
towards the top, and that as they will be advanc-
ing in a line, along the whole length of the three
miles, he will only see the advance of those
comparatively near to him, since folds or dips
in the ground will hide the others. Let him,
before he advances, look earnestly along the
line of the hill, as it shows up clear, in blazing
sunlight only a mile from him, to see his tactical
objective, one little clump of pines, three hun-
dred yards away, across what seem to be fields.
Let him see in the whole length of the hill no
single human being, nothing but scrub, earth, a
Gallipoli 97
few scattered buildings, of the Levantine type
(dirty white with roofs of dirty red) and some
patches of dark Scotch pine, growing as the
pine loves, on bleak crests. Let him imagine
himself to be more weary than he has ever been
in his life before, and dirtier than he has ever
believed it possible to be, and parched with
thirst, nervous, wild-eyed and rather lousy.
Let him think that he has not slept for more
than a few minutes together for eleven days
and nights, and that in all his waking hours he
has been fighting for his life, often hand to
hand in the dark with a fierce enemy, and that
after each fight he has had to dig himself a
hole in the ground, often with his hands, and
then walk three or four roadless miles to bring
up heavy boxes under fire. Let him think, too,
that in all those eleven days he has never for
an instant been out of the thunder of cannon,
that waking or sleeping their devastating crash
has been blasting the air across within a mile
or two, and this from an artillery so terrible
that each discharge beats as it were a wedge
of shock between the skull-bone and the brain.
98 GalUpoli
Let him think too that never, for an instant, in
all that time, has he been free or even partly
free from the peril of death in its most sudden
and savage forms, and that hourly in all that
time he has seen his friends blown to pieces at
his side, or dismembered, or drowned, or driven
mad, or stabbed, or sniped by some unseen
stalker, or bombed in the dark sap with a hand-
ful of dynamite in a beef-tin, till their blood is
caked upon his clothes and thick upon his face,
and that he knows, as he stares at the hill, that
in a few moments, more of that dwindling band,
already too few, God knows how many too few,
for the task to be done, will be gone the same
way, and that he himself may reckon that he
has done with life, tasted and spoken and loved
his last, and that in a few minutes more may
be blasted dead, or lying bleeding in the scrub,
with perhaps his face gone and a leg and an
arm broken, unable to move but still alive, un-
able to drive away the flies or screen the ever-
dropping rain, in a place where none will find
him, or be able to help him, a place where he
will die and rot and shrivel, till nothing is left
Gallipoli 99
of him but a few rags and a few remnants and
a little identification-disc flapping on his bones
in the wind. Then let him hear the intermit-
tent crash and rattle of the fire augment sud-
denly and awfully in a roaring, blasting roll, un-
speakable and unthinkable, while the air above,
that has long been whining and whistling, be-
comes filled with the scream of shells passing
like great cats of death in the air; let him see the
slope of the hill vanish in a few moments into
the white, yellow and black smokes of great ex-
plosions shot with fire, and watch the lines of
white puffs marking the hill in streaks where
the shrapnel searches a suspected trench; and
then, in the height of the tumult, when his brain
is shaking in his head, let him pull himself to-
gether with his friends, and clamber up out of
the trench, to go forward against an invisible
enemy, safe in some unseen trench expecting
him.
The Twenty-ninth Division went forward
under these conditions on the 6th of May.
They dashed on, or crawled, for a few yards at
a time, then dropped for a few instants before
ioo Gallipoli
squirming on again. In such an advance men
do not see the battlefield. They see the world
as the rabbit sees it, crouching on the ground,
just their own little patch. On broken ground
like that, full of dips and rises, men may be
able to see nothing but perhaps the ridge of a
bank ten feet ahead, with the dust flying in
spouts all along it, as bullets hit it, some thou-
sand a minute, and looking back or to their
flanks they may see no one but perhaps a few
men of their own platoon lying tense but expect-
ant, ready for the sign to advance while the
bullets pipe over them in a never-ending birdlike
croon. They may be shut off by some all-im-
portant foot of ground from seeing how they
are fronting, from all knowledge of what the
next platoon is doing or suffering. It may be
quite certain death to peep over that foot of
ground in order to find out, and while they wait
for a few instants shells may burst in their
midst and destroy a half of them. Then the
rest, nerving themselves, rush up the ridge, and
fall in a line dead under machine-gun fire. The
supports come up, creeping over their corpses,
Gallipoli 10 1
get past the ridge, into scrub which some shell
has set on fire. Men fall wounded in the fire,
and the cartridges in their bandoliers explode
and slowly kill them. The survivors crawl
through the scrub, half-choked, and come out
on a field full of flowers tangled three feet high
with strong barbed wire. They wait for a
while, to .try to make out where the enemy is.
They may see nothing but the slope of the field
running up to a sky line, and a flash of distant
sea on a flank, but no sign of any enemy, only
the crash of guns and the pipe and croon and
spurt of bullets. Gathering themselves to-
gether their brave men dash out to cut the wire
and are killed; others take their places and are
killed; others step out with too great a pride
even to stoop, and pull up the supports of the
wires and fling them down, and fall dead on
top of them, having perhaps cleared a couple
of yards. Then a couple of machine guns open
on the survivors and kill them all in thirty sec-
onds, with the concentrated fire of a battalion.
The supports come up, and hear about the
wire from some wounded man who has crawled
IO2 Gallipoli
back through the scrub. They send back word,
" Held up by wire," and in time the message
comes to the telephone which has just been
blown to pieces by a shell. Presently when the
telephone is repaired, the message reaches the
gunners, who fire high explosive shells on to
the wire, and on to the slopes where the machine
guns may be hidden. Then the supports go on
over the flowers and are met midway by a con-
centrated fire of shells, shrapnel, machine guns
and rifles. Those who are not killed lie down
among the flowers and begin to scrape little
heaps of earth with their hands to give protec-
tion to their heads. In the light sandy marl
this does not take long, though many are blown
to pieces or hit in the back as they scrape. As
before, they cannot see how the rest of the at-
tack is faring, nor even where the other pla-
toons of the battalion are; they lie scraping in
the roots of daffodils and lilies, while bullets
sing and shriek a foot or two over their heads.
A man peering from his place in the flowers may
make out that the man next to him, some three
yards away, is dead, and that the man beyond is
Gallipoli 103
praying, the man beyond him cursing, and the
man beyond him out of his mind from nerves
or thirst.
Long hours pass, but the air above them
never ceases to cry like a live thing with bullets
flying. Men are killed or maimed, and the
wounded cry for water. Men get up to give
them water and are killed. Shells fall at regu-
lar intervals along the field. The waiting men
count the seconds between the shells to check
the precision of the battery's fire. Some of
the bursts fling the blossoms and bulbs of
flowers into the bodies of men, where they are
found long afterwards by the X-rays. Bursts
and roars of fire on either flank tell of some
intense moment in other parts of the line.
Every feeling of terror and mental anguish and
anxiety goes through the mind of each man
there, and is put down by resolve.
The supports come up, they rise with a cheer,
and get out of the accursed flowers, into a gulley
where some men of their regiment are already
lying dead. There is a little wood to their
front; they make for that, and suddenly come
IO4 Gallipoli
upon a deep and narrow Turk trench full of
men. This is their first sight of the enemy.
They leap down into the trench and fight hand
to hand, kill and are killed, in the long grave
already dug. They take the trench, but open-
ing from the trench are saps, which the Turks
still hold. Men are shot dead at these saps
by Turk sharpshooters cunningly screened
within them. Bullets fall in particular places
in the trench from snipers hidden in the trees
of the wood. The men send back for bombs,
others try to find out where the rest of the bat-
talion lies, or send word that from the noise of
the fire there must be a battery of machine guns
beyond the wood, if the guns would shell it.
Presently, before the bombs come, bombs be-
gin to drop among them from the Turks.
Creeping up, the men catch them in their hands
before they explode and fling them back so
that they burst among the Turks. Some have
their hands blown off, other their heads, in
doing this, but the bloody game of catch goes
on till no Turks are left in the sap, only a few
wounded groaning men who slowly bleed to
Gallipoli 105
death there. After long hours, the supports
come up and a storm of high explosives searches
the little wood, and then with a cheer the rem-
nant goes forward out of the trench into the
darkness of the pines. Fire opens on them
from snipers in the trees and from machine
guns everywhere; they drop and die, and the
survivors see no enemy, only their friends fall-
ing and a place where no living thing can pass.
Men find themselves suddenly alone, with all
their friends dead, and no enemy in sight, but
the rush of bullets filling the air. They go back
to the trench, not afraid, but in a kind of maze,
and as they take stock and count their strength
there comes the roar of the Turkish war cry,
the drum-like proclamation of the faith, and
the Turks come at them with the bayonet.
Then that lonely remnant of a platoon stands
to it with rapid fire, and the machine gun rattles
like a motor bicycle, and some ribald or silly
song goes up, and the Turks fail to get home,
but die or waver and retreat and are themselves
charged as they turn. It is evening now; the
day has passed in long hours of deep experience,
106 Gallipoli
and the men have made two hundred yards.
They send back for supports and orders, link
up, if they are lucky, with some other part of
their battalion, whose adventures, fifty yards
away, have been as intense, but wholly different,
and prepare the Turk trench for the night.
Presently word reaches them from some far-
away H. Q. (some dug-out five hundred yards
back, in what seems, by comparison, like peace-
ful England) that there are no supports, and
that the orders are to hold the line at all costs
and prepare for a fresh advance on the morrow.
Darkness falls, and ammunition and water
come up, and the stretcher-bearers hunt for the
wounded by the groans, while the Turks search
the entire field with shell to kill the supports
which are not there. Some of the men in the
trench creep out to their front, and are killed
there as they fix a wire entanglement. The
survivors make ready for the Turk attack, cer-
tain soon to come. There is no thought of
sleep-; it is too cold for sleep; the men shiver
as they stare into the night; they take the coats
of the dead, and try to get a little warmth.
Gallipoli 107
There is no moon and the rain begins. The
marl at the bottom of the trench is soon a sticky
mud, and the one dry patch is continually being
sniped. A few exhausted ones fall not into
sleep but into nervous dreams, full of twitches
and cries, like dogs' nightmares, and away at
sea some ship opens with her great guns at an
unseen target up the hill. The terrific crashes
shake the air; some one sees a movement in the
grass and fires; others start up and fire. The
whole irregular line starts up and fires, the ma-
chine guns rattle, the officers curse, and the guns
behind, expecting an attack, send shells into
the woods. [Then slowly the fire drops and
dies, and stray Turks, creeping up, fling bombs
into the trench.
This kind of fighting, between isolated bodies
of men advancing in a great concerted tactical
movement stretching right across the Peninsula,
went on throughout the 6th, the yth and the 8th
of May, and ended on the evening of the 8th
in a terrific onslaught of the whole line, covered
by a great artillery. The final stage of the
io8 GalllpoU
battle was a sight of stirring and awful beauty.
The Allied line went forward steadily behind
the moving barrier of the explosions of their
shells. Every gun on both sides opened and
maintained a fire dreadful to hear and see.
Our men were fighting for a little patch of
ground vital not so much to the success of the
undertaking, the clearing of the Narrows, as
to their existence on the Peninsula. In such a
battle, each platoon, each section, each private
soldier influences the result, and " pays as cur-
rent coin in that red purchase " as the brigadier.
The working parties on the beaches left their
work (it is said) to watch and cheer that last
advance. It was a day of the unmatchable
clear ^Egean spring; Samothrace and Euboea
were stretched out in the sunset like giants
watching the chess, waiting, it seemed, almost
like human things, as they had waited for the
fall of Troy and the bale-fires of Agamemnon.
Those watchers saw the dotted order of our
advance stretching across the Peninsula, moving
slowly forward, and halting and withering
away, among fields of flowers of spring and
Gallipoli 109
the young corn that would never come to har-
vest. They saw the hump of Achi Baba flicker
and burn and roll up to heaven in a swathe of
blackness, and multitudinous brightness chang-
ing the face of the earth, and the dots of our
line still coming, still moving forward, and
halting and withering away, but still moving up
among the flashes and the darkness, more men,
and yet more men, from the fields of sacred
France, from the darkness of Senegal, from
sheep-runs at the ends of the earth, from blue-
gum-forests, and sunny islands, places of horses
and good fellows, from Irish pastures and
glens, and from many a Scotch and English city
and village and quiet farm; they went on and
they went on, up ridges blazing with explosion
into the darkness of death. Sometimes, as the
light failed, and peak after peak that had been
burning against the sky, grew rigid as the col-
our faded, the darkness of the great blasts hid
sections of the line, but when the darkness
cleared they were still there, line after line of
dots, still more, still moving forward and halt-
ing and withering away, and others coming,
no Gallipoli
and halting and withering away, and others fol-
lowing, as though those lines were not flesh and
blood and breaking nerve but some tide of the
sea coming in waves that fell yet advanced,
that broke a little further, and gained some
yard in breaking, and were then followed, and
slowly grew, that halted and seemed to wither,
and then gathered and went on, till night cov-
ered those moving dots, and the great slope was
nothing but a blackness spangled with the flashes
of awful fire.
What can be said of that advance? The
French were on the right, the Twenty-ninth
Division on the left, some Australians and New
Zealanders (brought down from Anzac) in
support. It was their thirteenth day of con-
tinual battle, and who will ever write the story
of even one half-hour of that thirteenth day?
Who will ever know one hundredth part of the
deeds of heroism done in them, by platoons
and sections and private soldiers, who offered
their lives without a thought to help some other
part of the line, who went out to cut wire, or
brought up water and ammunition, or cheered
Gallipoli in
on some bleeding remnant of a regiment, halt-
ing on that hill of death, and kept their faces
to the shrapnel and the never-ceasing pelt of
bullets, as long as they had strength to go and
light to see? They brought the line forward
from a quarter of a mile to six hundred yards
further into the Peninsula; they dug in after
dark on the line they had won, and for the next
thirty-six hours they stood to arms to beat back
the charges of the Turks who felt themselves
threatened at the heart.
Our army had won their hold upon the Pen-
insula. On the body of a dead Turk officer
was a letter written the night before to his wife,
a tender letter, filled mostly with personal mat-
ters. In it was the phrase, " These British are
the finest fighters in the world. We have
chosen the wrong friends."
IV
So great is the heat that the dust rises.
The Song of Roland.
DURING the next three weeks, the Allied troops
made small advances in parts of the lines held
by them at Anzac and Cape Helles. Fight-
ing was continuous in both zones, there was al-
ways much (and sometimes intense) artillery
fire. The Turks frequently attacked in force,
sometimes in very great force, but were re-
pulsed. Our efforts were usually concentrated
on some redoubt, stronghold, or salient, in the
nearer Turkish lines, the fire from which galled
our trenches, or threatened any possible ad-
vance. These posts were either heavily bom-
barded and then rushed under the cover of a
feu de barrage, or carried by surprise attack.
Great skill and much dashing courage were
shown in these assaults. The emplacements
of machine guns were seized and the guns de-
stroyed, dangerous trenches or parts of trenches
were carried and filled in, and many roosts or
hiding places of snipers were made untenable.
n6 GallipoU
These operations were on a small scale, and
were designed to improve the position then held
by us, rather than to carry the whole line further
up the Peninsula. Sometimes they failed, but
by far the greater number succeeded, so that
by these methods, eked out by ruses, mines,
clever invention and the most dare-devil brav-
ery, parts of our lines were advanced by more
than a hundred yards.
On the 4th of 'June, a second, great attack
was made by the Allied troops near Cape
Helles. Like the attack of the 6th-8th May,
it was an advance of the whole line, from the
Straits to the sea, against the enemy's front
line trenches. As before, the French were on
the right and the 29th Division on the left, but
between them, in this advance, were the R. N.
Division and the newly arrived 42nd Division.
Our men advanced after a prolonged and terri-
ble bombardment, which so broke down the
Turk defence that the works were carried all
along the line, except in one place, on the left
of the French sector and in one other place,
on our own left, near the sea. Our advance,
Gallipoli 117
as before, varied in depth from a quarter of
a mile to six hundred yards; all of it carried
by a rush, in a short time, owing to the violence
of the artillery preparation, though with heavy
losses from shrapnel and machine-gun fire. In
this attack, the 42nd or East Lancashire Divi-
sion received its baptism of fire. Even those
who had seen the men of the 29th Division
in the battles for the landing admitted that
" nothing could have been finer " than the ex-
treme gallantry of these newly landed men.
The Manchester Brigade and two companies
of the 5th Lancashire Fusiliers advanced with
the most glorious and dashing courage, routed
the Turks, carried both their lines of trenches;
and one battalion, the 6th, very nearly carried
the village of Krithia; there was, in fact, no
entrenched line between them and the top of
Achi Baba.
But in this campaign we were to taste, and
be upon the brink of victory in every battle, yet
have the prize dashed from us, by some fail-
ure elsewhere, each time. So, in this first rush,
when, for the first time, our men felt that they,
1 1 8 Gallipoli
not the Turks, were the real attackers, the vic-
tory was not to remain with us. We had no
high explosive shell and not enough shrapnel
shell to deny to the Turks the use of their
superior numbers and to hold them in a beaten
state. They rallied and made strong counter-
attacks especially upon a redoubt or earthwork-
fortress called the u Haricot," on the left of the
French sector, which the French had stormed
an hour before and garrisoned with Senegalese
troops. The Turks heavily shelled this work
and then rushed it; the Senegalese could not
hold it; the French could not support it; and
the Turks won it. Unfortunately, the Haricot
enfiladed the lines we had won. In a little
while the Turks developed from it a deadly en-
filade fire upon the R. N. Division which had
won the Turk trenches to the west of it. The
R. N. Division was forced to fall back and in
doing so uncovered the right of the Brigade of
Manchesters beyond it to the westward. The
Manchesters were forced to give ground, the
French were unable to make a new attack upon
the Haricot, so that by nightfall our position
GalUpoli 119
was less good than it had been at half-past
twelve.
But for the fall of the Haricot the day would
have been a notable victory for ourselves.
Still, over three miles of the Allied front, our
lines had been pushed forward from 200 to
400 yards. This, in modern war is a big ad-
vance, but it brings upon the conquerors a very
severe labor of digging. The trenches won
from the defence have to be converted to the
uses of the attack and linked up, by saps and
communication-trenches, with the works from
which the attack advanced. All this labour
had to be done by our men in the midst of bit-
ter fighting, for the Turks fought hard to win
back these trenches in many bloody counter at-
tacks, and (as always happened, after each ad-
vance) outlying works and trenches, from
which fire could be brought to bear upon the
newly won ground, had to be carried, filled in,
or blown up before the new line was secure.
A little after dawn on the 2ist June the
French stormed and won the Haricot redoubt,
and advanced the right of the Allied position
120 Gallipoli
by 600 yards ; the Turkish counter attacks were
bloodily defeated.
In the forenoon of the 28th June, the English
divisions advanced the left of the Allied posi-
tion by a full 1,000 yards. This attack, which
was one of the most successful of the cam-
paign, was the first of which it could be said
that it was a victory. Of course our presence
upon the Peninsula was in itself a victory, but
in this battle we were not trying to land nor
to secure ourselves, but (for the first time) to
force a decision. Three of our divisions chal-
lenged the greater part of the Turk army and
beat it. And here, for the first time in the
operations, we felt, what all our soldiers had
expected, that want of fresh men in reserve to
make a success decisive, which afterwards lost
us the campaign.
Our enemies have often said, that the Eng-
lish cannot plan nor execute an attack. In this
battle of June 28th, the attack was a perfect
piece of planning and execution. Everything
was exactly timed, everything worked smoothly.
Ten thousand soldiers, not one of whom had
Gallipoli 121
had more than six months' training, advanced
uphill after an artillery preparation and won
two lines of elaborately fortified trenches, by
the bayonet alone. Then, while these men con-
solidated and made good the ground which they
had won, the artillery lengthened their fuses
and bombarded the ground beyond them.
When the artillery ceased, ten thousand fresh
soldiers climbed out of the English lines, ran
forward, leaped across the two lines of Turk
trench already taken and took three more lines
of trench, each line a fortress in itself. Be-
sides advancing our position a thousand yards,
this attack forced back the right of the Turks
from the sea, and won a strong position be-
tween the sea and Krithia, almost turning Achi
Baba. But much more than this was achieved.
The great triumph of the day was the certainty
then acquired that the Turks were beaten, that
they were no longer the fierce and ardent fight-
ers who had rushed V beach in the dark, but
a shaken company who had caught the habit of
defeat and might break at any moment. They
were beaten; we had beaten them at every point
122 Gallipoli
and they knew that they were beaten. Every
man in the French and British lines knew that
the Turks were at the breaking point. We
had only to strike while the iron was hot to
end them.
As happened afterwards, after the battle of
August, we could not strike while the iron was
hot; we had not the men nor the munitions.
Had the fifty thousand men who came there in
July,and August but been there in June, our men
could have kept on striking. But they were
not there in June, and our victory of the 28th
could not be followed up. More than a month
passed before it could be followed up. Dur-
ing that month the Turks dug themselves new
fortresses, brought up new guns, made new
stores of ammunition, and remade their army.
Their beaten troops were withdrawn and re-
placed by the very pick and flower of the Turk-
ish Empire. When we attacked again, we
found a very different enemy; the iron was cold,
we had to begin again from the beginning.
Thirty-six hours after our June success, at
midnight in the night of June 29-30^, the
Gal lip oli 123
Turks made a counter attack, not at Cape
Helles, where their men were shaken, but at
Anzac, where perhaps they felt our menace
more acutely. A large army of Turks, about
30,000 strong, ordered by Enver Pasha " to
drive the foreigners into the sea or never to
look upon his face again," attacked the Anzac
position under cover of the fire of a great artil-
lery. They were utterly defeated with the loss
of about a quarter of their strength, some
7-8,000 killed and wounded.
All this fighting proved clearly that the
Turks, with all their power of fresh men, their
closeness to their reserves, and their superior
positions, could not beat us from what we had
secured, nor keep us from securing more. Our
advance into the Peninsula, though slow and
paid for with much life, was sure and becom-
ing less slow. What we had won we had
fought hard for and never ceased to fight hard
for, but we had won it and could hold it, and
with increasing speed add to it, and the Turks
knew this as well as we did. But early in May
something happened which had a profound
124 Gallipoli
result upon the course of the operations. It
is necessary to write of it at length, if only to
show the reader that this Dardanelles Cam-
paign was not a war in itself, but a part of a
war involving most of Europe and half of
Asia, and that, that being so, it was affected
by events in other parts of the war, as deeply
as it affected those parts in turn by its own
events.
No one, of the many who spoke to me about
the campaign, knew or understood that the
campaign, as planned, was not to be, solely, a
French and English venture, but (in its later
stages) a double attack upon the Turkish
power, by ourselves, on the Peninsula and the
Hellespont, and by the Russians, on the shores
of the Black Sea. [The double attack, threaten-
ing Turkey at the heart, was designed to force
the Turks to divide their strength, and, by caus-
ing uneasiness among the citizens, to keep in
and about Constantinople a large army which
might otherwise wreck our Mesopotamian ex-
pedition, threaten India and Egypt and prevent
the Grand Duke Nicholas from advancing
Gallipoli 125
from the Caucasus on Erzerum. But as the
Polish campaign developed adversely to Russia,
it became clear that it would be impossible for
her to give the assistance she had hoped.
Early in May, Sir Ian Hamilton learned,
that his advance, instead of being a part of a
concerted scheme, was to be the only attack
upon the Turks in that quarter, and that he
would have to withstand the greater part of the
Turkish army. This did not mean that the
k Turks could mass an overwhelming strength
against any part of his positions, since in the
narrow Peninsula there is not room for great
numbers to manoeuvre; but it meant that the
Turks would have always within easy distance
great reserves of fresh men to take the place
of those exhausted, and that without a corre-
spondingly great reserve we had little chance of
decisive success.
This change in the strategical scheme was
made after we were committed to the venture :
it made a profound difference to our position.
Unfortunately we were so deeply engaged in
other theatres that it was impossible to change
126 Gallipoli
our plans as swiftly and as profoundly as our
chances. The great reserve could not be sent
when it became necessary, early in May, nor
for more than two months. Until it came, it
happened, time after time, that even when we
fought and beat back the Turks they could be
reinforced before we could. All through the
campaign we fought them and beat them back,
but always, on the day after the battle, they
had a division of fresh men to put in to the
defence, while we, who had suffered more,
being the attackers, had but a handful with
which to follow up the success.
People have said, " But you could have kept
fresh divisions in reserve as easily as the Turks.
Why did you not send more men, so as to have
them ready to follow up a success? " I could
never answer this question. It is the vital
question. The cry for " fifty thousand more
men and plenty of high explosive " went up
daily from every trench in Gallipoli, and we
lost the campaign through not sending them in
time. On the spot of course our generals knew
that war (like life) consists of a struggle with
GaUipoli 127
disadvantages, and their struggle with these
was a memorable one. Only, when all was
done, their situation remained that of the Frank
rearguard in the Song of Roland. In that
poem the Franks could and did beat the Sara-
cens, but the Saracens brought up another army
before the Franks were reinforced. The
Franks could and did beat that army, too, but
the Saracens brought up another army before
the Franks were reinforced. The Franks
could and did beat that army, too, but then they
were spent and Roland had to sound his horn
and Charlemagne would not come to the sum-
mons of the horn, and the heroes were aban-
doned in the dolorous pass.
Summer came upon Gallipoli with a blinding
heat only comparable to New York in July.
The flowers which had been so gay with beauty
in the Helles fields in April soon wilted to
stalks. The great slope of Cape Helles took
on a savage and African look of desolation.
The air quivered over the cracking land. In
the blueness of the heat haze the graceful ter-
128 Gallipoli
rible hills looked even more gentle and beautiful
than before; and one who was there said that
" there were little birds that droned, rather
like the English yellow-hammers." With the
heat, which was a new experience to all the
young English soldiers there, came a plague of
flies beyond all record and belief. Men ate
and drank flies, the filthy insects were every-
where. The ground in places was so dark with
them, that one could not be sure whether the
patches were ground or flies.. Our camps and
trenches were kept clean; they were well
scavenged daily; but only a few yards away
were the Turk trenches, which were invariably
filthy: there the flies bred undisturbed, perhaps
encouraged. There is a fine modern poem
which speaks of the Indian sun in summer as
" the blazing death-star." Men in Gallipoli
in the summer of 1915 learned to curse the sun
as an enemy more cruel than the Turk. With
the sun and the plague of flies came the torment
of thirst, one of the greatest torments which
life has the power to inflict.
Gallipoli 1 29
At Cape Helles, in the summer, there was
a shortage but no great scarcity of water, for
the Turk wells supplied more than half the
army and less than half the water needed had
to be brought from abroad. At Anzac how-
ever there was always a scarcity, for even in
the spring not more than a third of the water
needed could be drawn from wells. At first,
water could be found by digging shallow pans
in the beach, but this method failed when the
heats began. [Two-thirds (or more) of the
water needed at Anzac had always to be
brought from abroad, and to bring this two-
thirds regularly and to land it and store it under
shell fire was a difficult task. " When opera-
tions were on," as in the August battle, the
difficulty of distribution was added to the other
difficulties, and then indeed want of water
brought our troops to death's door. At Anzac
11 when operations were on " even in the in-
tensest heat the average ration of water for all
purposes was, perhaps, at most, a pint and a
half, sometimes only a pint. And though this
130 Gallipoli
extremity was as a rule only reached " when
operations were on," when there was heavy
fighting, it was then that the need was greatest.
In peace, in comfortable homes, in cool
weather, civilised people need or consume a
little less than three pints of liquid in each day.
In hot weather and when doing severe bodily
labour they need more; perhaps half a gallon
in the day. Thirst, which most of us know
solely as a pleasant zest to drinking, soon be-
comes a hardship, then, in an hour, an obses-
sion, and by high noon a madness, to those
who toil in the sun with nothing to drink.
Possibly to most of the many thousands who
were in the Peninsula last summer, the real
enemies were not the Turks, but the sun in
Heaven, shaking " the pestilence of his light,"
and thirst that withered the heart and cracked
the tongue.
Some have said to me, " Yes, but the Turks
must have suffered, too, just as much, in that
waterless ground." It is not so. The Turks
at Cape Helles held the wells at Krithia; in-
land from Anzac they held the wells near Lone-
Gal lip oli 131
some Pine and Koja Dere. They had other
wells at Maidos, and Gallipoli. They had
always more water than we, and (what is
more) the certainty of it. Most of them came
from lands with little water and great heat,
ten (or more) degrees further to the south
than any part of England. Heat and thirst
were old enemies to them, they were tempered
to them. Our men had to serve an apprentice-
ship to them, and pay for what they learned in
bodily hardship. Not that our men minded
hardship; they did not; they were volunteers
who had chosen their fate and were there of
their own choice, and no army in the world has
ever faced suffering more cheerily. But this
hardship of thirst was a weight upon them,
throughout the summer; like malaria it did not
kill, but it lowered all vitality. It halved the
possible effort of men always too few for the
work in hand. Let it now double the honour
paid to them.
In the sandy soil of the Peninsula were many
minute amoebae, which played their part in the
132 Gallipoli
summer suffering. In the winds of the great
droughts of July and August the dust blew
about our positions like smoke from burning
hills. It fell into food and water and was
eaten and drunk (like the flies) at each meal.
Within the human body the amoebae of the sand
set up symptoms like those of dysentery, as a
rule slightly less severe than the true dysentery
of camps. After July, nearly every man in
our army in Gallipoli, suffered from this evil.
Like the thirst, it lowered more vitality than
it destroyed; many died, it is true, but then
nearly all were ill: it was the universal sickness
not the occasional death that mattered.
Pass now to the position of affairs at the
end of June. We were left to our own strength
in this struggle, the Turks were shaken : it was
vital to our chances to attack again before they
recovered. We had not the men to attack
again, but they were coming and were due in
a few weeks' time. While they were on their
way, the question, how to use them, was con-
sidered.
Gallipoli 133
As the army's task was to help the fleet
through the Narrows it had to operate in
the southwestern portion of the Peninsula.
Further progress against Achi Baba in the
Helles sector was hardly possible; for the
Turks had added too greatly to their trenches
there since the attacks of April and May.
Operations on the Asian coast were hardly pos-
sible without a second army; operations against
Bulair were not likely to help the fleet. Opera-
tions in the Anzac sector offered better chances
of success. It was hoped that a thrust south-
eastward from Anzac might bring our men
across to the Narrows or to the top of the
ridges which command the road to Constan-
tinople. It was reasonable to think that such
a thrust, backed up by a new landing in force
to the north, in Suvla Bay, might turn the
Turkish right and destroy it. If the men at
Helles attacked, to contain the Turks in the
south, and the men on the right of Anzac at-
tacked, to hold the [Turks at Anzac, it was
possible that men on the left of Anzac, backed
134 Gallipoli
up by a new force marching from Suvla, might
give a decisive blow. The Turk position on
the Peninsula roughly formed a letter L. The
plan (as it shaped) was to attack the horizon-
tal line at Cape Helles, press the centre of the
vertical line at Anzac, and bend back, crumple
and break the top of the vertical line between
the Anzac position and Suvla. At the same
time, Suvla Bay was to be seized and prepared
as a harbour at which supplies might be landed,
even in the stormy season.
Some soldier has said, that " the simple
thing is the difficult thing." The idea seems
simple to us, because the difficulty has been
cleared away for us by another person's hard
thought. Such a scheme of battle, difficult to
think out in the strain of holding on and under
the temptation to go slowly, improving what
was held, was also difficult to execute. Very
few of the great battles of history, not even
those in Russia, in Manchuria, and in the Vir-
ginian Wilderness have been fought on such
difficult ground, under such difficult conditions.
The chosen battlefield (the southwestern
Galll poll 135
end of the Peninsula) has already been de-
scribed; the greater part of it consists of the
Cape Helles and Anzac positions, but the vital
or decisive point, where, if all went well, the
Turk right was to be bent back, broken and
routed, lies to the north of Anzac on the spurs
and outlying bastions of Sari Bair.
Suvla Bay, where the new landing was to
take place, lies three miles to the north of
Anzac. It is a broad, rather shallow semi-
circular bay (open to the west and southwest)
with a partly practicable beach, some of it
(the southern part) fairly flat and sandy, the
rest steepish and rocky though broken by
creeks. Above it, one on the north, one on
the south horn of the bay, rise two small low
knolls or hillocks known as Ghazi Baba and
Lala Baba, the latter a clearly marked tactical
feature. To the north, beyond the horn of
the bay, the coast is high, steep-to sandy cliff,
broken with gullies and washed by deep water,
but to the south, all the way to Anzac the
coast is a flat, narrow, almost straight sweep of
sandy shore shutting a salt marsh and a couple
136 Galllpoli
of miles of lowland from the sea ; it is a lagoon
beach of the common type, with the usual
feature of shallow water in the sea that washes
it. The northern half of this beach is known
as Beach C, the southern as Beach B.
Viewed from the sea, the coast chosen for
the new landing seems comparatively flat and
gentle, seemingly, though not really, easy to
land upon, but with no good military position
near it. It looks as though once, long ago,
the sea had thrust far inland there, in a big
bay or harbour stretching from the high ground
to the north of Suvla to the left of the Anzac
position. This bay, if it ever existed, must
have been four miles long and four miles across,
a very noble space of water, ringed by big,
broken, precipitous hills, into which it thrust in
innumerable creeks and combes. Then (pos-
sibly) in the course of ages, silt brought down
by the torrents choked the bay, and pushed the
sea further and further back, till nothing re-
mained of the harbour but the existing Suvla
Bay and the salt marsh (dry in summer) . The
hills ringing Suvla Bay and this flat or slightly
Scale of Miles
m<? * * * ? ?
Map No. 3
Gal lip oil 137
rising expanse which may once have been a part
of it, stand (to the fancy) like a rank that has
beaten back an attack. .They are high and
proud to the north, they stand in groups in the
centre, but to the south, where they link on to
the broken cliffs of the Anzac position, they
are heaped in tumbling precipitous disordered
bulges of hill, cut by every kind of cleft and
crumpled into every kind of fold, as though
the dry land had there been put to it to keep
out the sea. These hills are the scene of the
bitterest fighting of the battle.
Although these hills in the Suvla district
stand in a rank, yet in the centre of the rank
there are two gaps where the ancient harbour
of our fancy thrust creeks far inland. These
gaps or creeks open a little to the south of the
north and south limits of Suvla Bay. They
are watered, cultivated valleys with roads or
tracks in them. In the northern valley is a
village of some sixty houses called Anafarta
Sagir, or Little Anafarta. In the southern
valley is a rather larger village of some ninety
houses called Biyuk Anafarta, or Great An-
138 Gallipoli
afarta. The valleys are called after these
villages.
Between these valleys is a big blunt-headed
jut or promontory of higher ground, which
thrusts out towards the bay. At the Suvla end
of this jut, about 1,000 yards from the bight
of the Salt Marsh; it shoots up in three peaks
or top knots two of them united in the lump
called Chocolate Hill, the other known as
Scimitar Hill or Hill 70; all, roughly, 150 feet
high. About a mile directly inland from
Chocolate Hill is a peak of about twice the
height, called Ismail Oglu Tepe, an abrupt and
savage heap of cliff, dented with chasms, harshly
scarped at the top, and covered' with dense
thorn scrub. This hill, is the southernmost
feature in the northern half of the battle-field.
The valley of Great Anafarta, which runs east
and west below it, cuts the battle-field in two.
The southern side of the Great Anafarta
valley is just that disarrangement of precipitous
bulged hill which rises and falls in crags, peaks
and gulleys all the way from the valley to
Anzac. Few parts of the earth can be more
Gallipoli 139
broken and disjointed than this mass of preci-
pice, combes and ravines. A savage climate
has dealt with it since the beginning of time,
with great heats, frosts and torrents. It is
not so much a ridge or chain of hills as the
manifold outlying bastions and buttresses of
Sari Bair, from which they are built out in
craggy bulges parted by ravines. It may be
said that Sari Bair begins at Gaba Tepe (to the
south of the Anzac position) and stretches
thence northeasterly towards Great Anafarta
in a rolling and confused five miles of hill that
has all the features of a mountain. It is not
high. Its peaks range from about 250 to 600
feet; its chief peak (Koja Chemen Tepe) is a
little more than 900 feet. Nearly all of it is
trackless, waterless and confused, densely cov-
ered with scrub (sometimes with forest) lit-
tered with rocks, an untamed savage country.
The southwestern half of it made the Anzac
position, the northeastern and higher half was
the prize to be fought for.
It is the watershed of that part of the Penin-
sula. The gulleys on its south side drain down
140 Gallipoli
to the Hellespont; those upon its north side
drain to the flat land which may once have been
submerged as a part of Suvla Bay. These
northern gulleys are great savage irregular
gashes or glens running westerly or north-
westerly from the hill bastions. Three of
them, the three nearest to the northern end of
the Anzac position, may be mentioned by name :
Sazli Beit Dere, Chailak Dere, and Aghyl
Dere. The word Dere means watercourse;
but all three were bone dry in August when the
battle was fought. It must be remembered
that in the trackless Peninsula a watercourse of
this kind is the nearest approach to a road, and
(to a military force) the nearest approach to
a covered way. All these three Deres lead up
the heart of the hills to those highlands of Sari
Bair where we wished to plant ourselves.
From the top of Sari Bair one can look down
on the whole Turkish position facing Anzac,
and see that position not only dominated but
turned and taken in reverse. One can see
(only three miles away) the only road to Con-
stantinople, and (five miles away) the little
Galli poll 141
port of Maidos near the Narrows. To us the
taking of Sari Bair meant the closing of that
road to the passing of Turk reinforcements,
and the opening of the Narrows to the fleet.
It meant victory, and the beginning of the end
of this great war, with home and leisure for
life again, and all that peace means. Knowing
this, our soldiers made a great struggle for
Sari Bair, but Fate turned the lot against them.
Sari was not to be an English hill, though the
flowers on her sides will grow out of English
dust forever. Those who lie there thought, as
they fell, that over their bodies our race would
pass to victory. It may be that their spirits
linger there at this moment, waiting for the
English bugles and the English singing, and the
sound of the English ships passing up the Hel-
lespont.
Among her tumble of hills, from the Anzac
position to Great Anafarta, Sari Bair thrusts
out several knolls, peaks and commanding
heights. Within the Anzac position, is the
little plateau of Lone or Lonesome Pine to be
described later. Further to the northeast are
142 Gal lip oil
the heights known as Baby 700 and Battleship
Hill, and beyond these, still further to the
northeast, the steep peak of Chunuk Bair. All
of these before this battle were held by the
Turks, whose trenches defended them. Lone
Pine is about 400 feet high, the others rather
more, slowly rising, as they go northeast, but
keeping to about the height of the English
Chilterns. Chunuk Bair, the highest of these,
is about 750 feet. Beyond Chunuk, half-a-mile
further to the northeast, is Hill Q, and beyond
Hill Q a very steep deep gulley, above which
rises the beautiful peak, the summit of Sari,
known as Koja Chemen Tepe. One or two
Irish hills in the wilder parts of Antrim are
like this peak, though less fleeced with brush.
In height, as I have said, it is a little more than
900 feet, or about the height of our Bredon
Hill. One point about it may be noted. It
thrusts out a great spur or claw for rather more
than a mile due north; this spur, which is much
gullied, is called Abd-el-Rahman Bair.
For the moment, Chunuk Bair is the most
important point to remember, because
Gal lip oli 143
(a) It was the extreme right of the pre-
pared Turk position.
(b) The three Deres mentioned a couple of
pages back have their sources at its foot and
start there, like three roads starting from the
walls of a city on their way to the sea. [They
lead past the hills known as Table Top and
Rhododendron Spur. Close to their begin-
nings at the foot of Chunuk is a building known
as The Farm, round which the fighting was
very fierce.
The " idea " or purpose of the battle was
" to endeavour to seize a position across the
Gallipoli Peninsular from Gaba Tep to Maidos,
with a protected line of supply from Suvla
Bay."
[The plan of the attack was, that a strong
force in Anzac should endeavour to throw back
the right wing of the Turks, drive them south
towards Kilid Bahr and thus secure a position
commanding the narrow part of the Peninsula.
Meanwhile a large body of troops should
secure Suvla, and another large body, landing
at Suvla, should clear away any Turkish forces
144 Galllpoli
on the hills between the Anafarta valleys, and
then help the attacking force from Anzac by
storming Sari Bair from the north and west.
The 6th of August was fixed for the first day
of the attack from Anzac; the landing at Suvla
was to take place during the dark hours of
the night of the 6th~7th. " The 6th was both
the earliest and the latest date possible for the
battle, the earliest, because it was the first by
which the main part of the reinforcements
would be ready, the latest, because of the
moon." Both in the preparation and the sur-
prise of this attack dark nights were essential.
Sir Ian Hamilton's Despatch (reprinted
from the London Gazette of Tuesday, the 4th
January, 1916) shows that this battle of the
6th-ioth August was perhaps the strangest and
most difficult battle ever planned by mortal
general. It was to be a triple battle, fought
by three separated armies, not in direct com-
munication with each other. [There was no
place from which the battle, as a whole, could
be controlled, nearer than the island of Imbros,
(fourteen miles from any part of the Peninsula)
Gallipoli 145
to which telegraphic cables led from Anzac and
Cape Helles. The left wing of our army, de-
signed for the landing at Suvla, was not only
not landed, when the battle began, but not con-
centrated. There was no adjacent subsidiary
base big enough (or nearly big enough) to hold
it. " On the day before the battle, part were
at Imbros, part at Mudros, and part at Mity-
lene . . . separated respectively by 14, 60, and
1 20 miles of sea from the arena into which
they were simultaneously to appear." The
vital part of the fight was to be fought by
troops from Anzac. The Anzac position was
an open book to every Turk aeroplane and
every observer on Sari Bair. The reinforce-
ments for this part of the battle had to be
landed in the dark, some days before the
battle, and kept hidden underground, during
daylight, so that the Turks should not see them
and suspect what was being planned.
In all wars, but especially in modern wars,
great tactical combinations have been betrayed
by very little things. In war, as in life, the
unusual thing, however little, betrays the un-
146 GalUpoll
usual thing, however great. An odd bit of
paper round some cigars betrayed the hopes of
the American Secession, some litter in the sea
told Nelson where the French fleet was, one man
rising up in the grass by a roadside saved the
wealth of Peru from the hands of Drake. The
Turks were always expecting an attack from
Anzac. It is not too much to say that they
searched the Anzac position hourly for the cer-
tain signs of an attack, reinforcements and
supplies. They had not even to search the
whole position for these signs, since there was
only one place (towards Fisherman's Hut)
where they could be put. If they had sus-
pected that men and stores were being landed,
they would have guessed at once, that a thrust
was to be made, and our attacks upon their
flanks would have met with a prepared defence.
It was vital to our chance of success that
nothing unusual, however little, should be
visible in Anzac from the Turk positions during
the days before the battle. One man staring
up at an aeroplane would have been evidence
enough to a quick observer that there was a
Galli poll 147
new-comer on the scene. One new water tank,
one new gun, one mule not yet quiet from the
shock of landing, might have betrayed all the
adventure. Very nearly thirty thousand men,
one whole Division and one Brigade of English
soldiers, and a Brigade of Gurkhas, with their
guns and stores, had to be landed unobserved
and hidden.
There was only one place in which they could
be hidden, and that was under the ground.
The Australians had to dig hiding places for
them before they came.
In this war of digging, the daily life in the
trenches gives digging enough to every soldier.
Men dig daily even if they do not fight. At
Anzac in July the Australians had a double
share of digging, their daily share in the front
lines, and, when that was finished, their nightly
share, preparing cover for the new troops.
During the nights of the latter half of July the
Australians at Anzac dug, roofed and covered
not less than twenty miles of dugouts. All of
this work was done in their sleep time, after
the normal day's work of fighting, digging and
148 GalUpoli
carrying up stores. Besides digging these
hiding places they carried up, fixed, hid, and
filled the water tanks which were to supply the
new-comers.
On the night of the 3rd of August when the
landing of the new men began, the work was
doubled. Everybody who could be spared
from the front trenches went to the piers to
help to land, carry inland and hide the guns,
stores, carts and animals coming ashore. The
nights, though lengthening, were still summer
nights. .There were seven hours of semi-dark-
ness in which to cover up all traces of what
came ashore. The new-comers landed at the
rate of about 1,500 an hour, during the nights
of the 3rd, 4th and 5th of August. During
those nights, the Australians landed, carried
inland and hid not less than one thousand tons
of shells, cartridges and food, some hundreds
of horses and mules, many guns, and two or
three hundred water-carts and ammunition
carts. All night-long, for those three nights,
the Australians worked like schoolboys.
Often, towards dawn, it was a race against
j '
Gallipoli 149
time, but always at dawn, the night's tally of
new troops were in their billets, the new stores
were under ground and the new horses hidden.
When the morning aeroplanes came over, their
observers saw nothing unusual in any part of
Anzac. The half-naked men were going up
and down the gullies, the wholly naked men
were bathing in the sea, everything else was as
it had always been, nor were any transports on
the coast. For those three nights nearly all the
Australians at Anzac gave up most of their
sleep. They had begun the work by digging
the cover, they took a personal pride and pleas-
ure in playing the game of cache-cache to the
end.
It is difficult to praise a feat of the kind and
still more difficult to make people understand
what the work meant. Those smiling and
glorious young giants thought little of it.
They loved their chiefs and they liked the fun,
and when praised for it looked away with a
grin. [The labour of the task can only be felt
by those who have done hard manual work in
hot climates. Digging is one of the hardest
150 Gallipoli
kinds of work, even when done in a garden with
a fork. When done in a trench with a pick
and shovel it is as hard work as threshing with
a flail. Carrying heavy weights over uneven
ground is harder work still; and to do either
of these things on a salt-meat diet with a scanty
allowance of water, is very, very hard; but to
do them at night after a hard day's work, in-
stead of sleeping, is hardest of all; even farm-
labourers would collapse and sailors mutiny
when asked to do this last. It may be said
that no one could have done this labour, but
splendid young men splendidly encouraged to
do their best. Many of these same young men
who had toiled thus almost without sleep for
three days and nights, fell in with the others
and fought all through the battle.
But all this preparation was a setting of prec-
edents and the doing of something new to war.
Never before have 25,000 men been kept
buried under an enemy's eye until the hour for
the attack. Never before have two Divisions
of all arms been brought up punctually, by ship,
over many miles of sea, from different ports,
Galli poll 151
to land under fire, at an appointed time, to
fulfil a great tactical scheme.
But all these difficulties were as nothing to
the difficulty of making sure that the men fight-
ing in the blinding heat of a Gallipoli August
should have enough water to drink. Eighty
tons of water a day does not seem very much.
It had only to be brought five hundred miles,
which does not seem very far, to those who in
happy peace can telephone for 80 tons of any-
thing to be sent five hundred miles to anywhere.
But in war, weight, distance and time become
terrible and tragic things, involving the lives
of armies. The water supply of that far
battlefield, indifferent as it was, at the best, was
a triumph of resolve and skill unequalled yet
in war. It is said that Wellington boasted
that, while Napoleon could handle men, he,
Wellington, could feed them. Our naval
officers can truly say that, while Sir Ian Hamil-
ton can handle men, they can give them drink.
As to the enemy before the battle, it was
estimated that (apart from the great strategi-
cal reserves within 30 or 40 miles) there were
152 Galli poll
30,000 Turks in the vital part of the battle-
field, to the north of Kilid Bahr. ' Twelve
thousand of these were in the trenches opposite
Anzac; most of the rest in the villages two
or three miles to the south and southeast of
Sari Bair. Three battalions were in the Anaf-
arta villages, one battalion was entrenched on
Ismail Oglu Tepe; small outposts held the two
Baba hillocks on the bay, and the land north
of the bay was patrolled by mounted gen-
darmerie. These scattered troops on the Turk
right had guns with them; it was not known
how many. The beach of Suvla was known to
be mined.
August began with calm weather. The
scattered regiments of the Divisions for Suvla,
after some weeks of hard exercise ashore, were
sent on board their transports. At a little be-
fore four o'clock on the afternoon of the 6th
August, the 29th Division began the battle by
an assault on the Turk positions below Krithia.
Roland put the horn to his mouth, gripped it hard
and with great heart blew it. The hills were high and
the sound went very far: thirty leagues wide they heard
it echo. Charles heard it and all his comrades; so the
King said, " Our men are fighting." Count Guenes
answered: " If any other said that, I should call him
a liar."
Count Roland in pain and woe and great weakness
blew his horn. The bright bloo.d was running from
his mouth and the temples of his brains were broken.
But the noise of the horn was very great. Charles
heard it as he was passing at the ports; Naimes heard
it, the Franks listened to it. So the King said, " I
hear the horn of Roland ; he would never sound it if he
were not fighting." Guenes answered, "There. is no
fighting. You are old and white and hoary. You are
like a child W 7 hen you say such things."
Count Roland's mouth was bleeding; the temples
of his brain were broken. He blew his horn in weak-
ness and pain. Charles heard it and his Franks heard
it. So the King said: " That horn has long breath."
Duke Naimes answered, " Roland is in trouble. He is
fighting, on my conscience. Arm yourself. Cry your
war-cry. Help the men of your house. You hear
plainly that Roland is in trouble."
The Emperor made sound his horns. . . . All the
barons of the army mounted their chargers. But what
use was that? They had delayed too long. What
use was that? It was worth nothing; they had stayed
too long; they could not be in time.
Then Roland said, " Here we shall receive martyr-
dom, and now I know well that we have but a moment
to live. But may all be thieves who do not sell them-
selves dearly first. Strike, knights, with your bright
swords; so change your deaths and lives, that sweet
France be not shamed by us. When Charles comes
into this field he shall see such discipline upon the
Saracens that he shall not fail to bless us."
The Song of Roland.
THE Cape Helles attack, designed to keep the
Turks to the south of Kilid Bahr from rein-
forcing those near Anzac, became a very des-
perate struggle. jThe Turk trenches there were
full of men, for the Turks had been preparing
a strong attack upon ourselves, which we fore-
stalled by a few hours. The severe fighting
lasted for a week along the whole Cape Helles
front, but it was especially bloody and terrible
in the centre, in a vineyard to the west of the
Krithia road. It has often happened in war,
that some stubbornness in attack or defence
has roused the same quality in the opposer, till
the honour of the armies seems pledged to the
taking or holding of one patch of ground, per-
haps not vital to the battle. It may be that in
war one resolute soul can bind the excited minds
of multitudes in a kind of bloody mesmerism;
but these strange things are not studied as they
should be. Near Krithia, the battle, which
began as a containing attack, a minor part of
iS5
156 GaUlpoli
a great scheme, became a furious week-long
fight for this vineyard, a little patch of ground
" 200 yards long by 100 yards broad."
From the 6th-i3th of August, the fight for
this vineyard never ceased. Our Lancashire
regiments won most of it at the first assault on
the 6th. For the rest of the week they held
it against all that the Turks could bring against
them. It was not a battle in the military text-
book sense : it was a fight man to man, between
two enemies whose blood was up. It was a
week-long cursing and killing scrimmage, the
men lying down to fire and rising up to fight
with the bayonet, literally all day long, day
after day, the two sides within easy bombing
distance all the time. The Turks lost some
thousands of men in their attacks upon this
vineyard after a week of fighting, they rushed
it in a night attack, were soon bombed out of
it and then gave up the struggle for it. This
bitter fighting not only kept the Turks at Cape
Helles from reinforcing those at Anzac; it
caused important Turk reinforcements to be
sent to the Helles sector.
Galli poll 157
Less than an hour after the 29th Division
began the containing battle at Krithia, the
Australians at Anzac began theirs. This, the
attack on the Turk fort at Lone Pine, in the
southern half of the Anzac front, was designed
to keep large bodies of Turks from reinforcing
their right, on Sari Bair, where the decisive
blow was to be struck. It was a secondary
operation, not the main thrust, but it was in
itself important, since to those at Anzac, the
hill of Lone Pine was the gate into the nar-
rowest part of the Peninsula, and through that
gate, as the lurks very well knew, a rush might
be made from Anzac upon Maidos and the
Narrows. Such a thrust from Lone Pine, turn-
ing all the Turkish works on the range of Sari
Bair, was what the Turks expected and feared
from us. They had shewn us as much, quite
plainly, all through the summer. Any move-
ment, feint, or demonstration against Lone
Pine, brought up their reserves at once. It
was the sensitive spot on their not too strong
left wing. If we won through there, we had
their main water supply as an immediate prize
158 Gallipoli
and no other position in front of us from
which we could be held. Any strong attack
there was therefore certain to contain fully half
a division of the enemy.
The hill of Lone or Lonesome Pine is a little
plateau less than 400 feet high running N. W.
S. E. and measuring perhaps 250 yards long
by 200 across. On its southwestern side it
drops down in gullies to a col or ridge, known
as Pine Ridge, which gradually declines away
to the low ground near Gaba Tepe. On its
northeastern side it joins the high ground
known as Johnston's Jolly, which was, alas,
neither jolly nor Johnston's, but a strong part
of the Turk position.
We already held a little of the Lone Pine
Plateau; our trenches bulged out into it in a
convexity or salient known as The Pimple, but
the Turks held the greater part, and their
trenches curved out the other way, in a mouth,
concavity or trap opening towards The Pimple
as though ready to swallow it. [The opposing
lines of trenches ran from north to south across
the plateau, with from 50 to 100 yards between
GallipoU 159
them. Both to the north and south of the
plateau are deep gullies. Just beyond these
gullies Turk trenches were so placed that the
machine guns in them could sweep the whole
plateau. The space between the Australian
and Turk lines was fairly level hill-top, covered
with thyme and short scrub.
For some days before the 6th August the
warships had been shelling the [Turk position
on Lone Pine to knock away the barbed wire
in front of it. On the 5th, the Australian
brigade, told off for the attack, sharpened
bayonets and prepared their distinguishing
marks of white bands for the left arms and
white patches for the backs of their right
shoulders. In the afternoon of the 6th the
shelling by the ships became more intense; at
half-past four it quickened to a very heavy fire ;
at exactly half-past five it stopped suddenly,
" the three short whistle blasts sounded and
were taken up along the line, our men cleared
the parapet," in two waves on a front of about
1 60 yards, " and attacked with vigour." The
hill top over which they charged was in a night
1 60 GallipoU
of smoke and dust from the explosions of the
shells, and into that night, already singing with
enemy bullets, the Australians disappeared.
They had not gone twenty yards before all that
dark and blazing hill top was filled with ex-
plosion and flying missiles from every enemy
gun. One speaks of a hail of bullets, but no
hail is like fire, no hail in a form of death cry-
ing aloud a note of death, no hail screams as
it strikes a stone, or stops a strong man in his
stride. Across that kind of hail the Austral-
ians charged on Lone Pine. " It was a grim
kind of steeplechase," said one, " but we meant
to get to Koja Dere." They reached the
crumpled wire of the entanglement, and got
through it to the parapet of the Turk trench,
where they were held up. Those behind them
at The Pimple, peering through the darkness,
to see if any had survived the rush, saw figures
on the parados of the enemy's trench, and
wondered what was happening. They sent
forward the third wave, with one full company
carrying picks and shovels, to make good what
Galli poll 161
was won. The men of this third wave found
what was happening.
The Turkish front line trench was not, like
most trenches, an open ditch into which men
could jump, but covered over along nearly all
its length with blinders and beams of pinewood,
heaped with sandbags, and in some places with
a couple of feet of earth. Under this cover
the Turks fired at our men through loopholes,
often with their rifles touching their victims.
Most of the Australians, after heaving in vain
to get these blinders up, under a fire that grew
hotter every instant, crossed them, got into the
open communication trenches in the rear of the
Turk line, and attacked through them; but
some, working together, hove up a blinder or
two, and down the gaps so made those brave
men dropped themselves, to a bayonet fight like
a rat fight in a sewer, with an enemy whom they
could hardly see, in a narrow dark gash in the
earth where they were, at first, as one to five
or seven to ten.
More and more men dropped down or
1 62 Gallipoli
rushed in from the rear; the Turks so penned
in, fought hard, but could not beat back the
attack. They surrendered and were disarmed.
The survivors were at least as many as their
captors, who had too much to do at that time
to send them to the rear, even if there had been
a safe road by which to send them. They
were jammed up there in the trenches with the
Australians, packed man to man, suffering from
their friends' fire and getting in the way.
The first thing to be done was to block up the
communication trenches against the Turkish
counter attack. Every man carried a couple of
sandbags, and with these, breastworks and
walls were built. Their work was done in a
narrow dark sweltering tunnel, heaped with
corpses and wounded and crowded with prison-
ers who might at any moment have risen. Al-
ready the Turks had begun their counter at-
tacks. At every other moment a little rush of
Turks came up the communication trenches,
flung their bombs in the workers' faces, and
were bayoneted as they threw. The trenches
curved and zigzagged in the earth; the men in
Inside an Australian trench, showing a man using a periscope rifle
and another man keeping watch by means of a periscope
Gallipoli 163
one section could neither see nor hear what the
men in the nearest sections were doing. What
went on under the ground there in the making
good of those trenches will never be known.
From half-past five till midnight every section of
the line was searched by bombs and bullets, by
stink pots, and sticks of dynamite, by gas-bombs
and a falling tumult of shell and shrapnel,
which only ceased to let some rush of Turks
attack, with knives, grenades and bayonets,
hand to hand and body to body in a blackness
like the darkness of a mine. At midnight the
wounded were lying all over the trenches, the
enemy dead were so thick that our men had to
walk on them, and bombs were falling in such
numbers that every foot in those galleries was
stuck with human flesh. No man slept that
night. At half-past seven next morning (the
yth) a small quantity of bread and tea was
rushed across the plateau to the fighters, who
had more than earned their breakfast. Turk
shell had by this time blown up some of the
head-cover and some of the new communication
trenches were still only a few feet deep. A
1 64 Gallipoli
Colonel passing along one of them told an
officer that his section of the trench was too
shallow. Half-an-hour later, in passing back,
he found the officer and three men blown to
pieces by a shell; in a few minutes more he was
himself killed. At noon the bombing became
so severe that some sections of the line were
held only by one or two wounded men. At one
o'clock the enemy attacked furiously with bomb
and bayonet, in great force. They came on in
a mass, in wave after wave, shoulder to
shoulder, heads down, shouting the name of
God. They rushed across the plateau, jumped
into the trenches and were mixed up with our
men in a hand-to-hand fight, which lasted for
five hours. Not many of them could join in
the fight at one time, and not many of them
went back to the lurk lines; but they killed
many of our men, and when their last assault
failed our prize was very weakly held. At
half-past seven the survivors received a cheer-
ing (and truthful) message from the Brigadier
" that no fighters can surpass Australians," and
almost with the message came another Turk
Galli poll 165
assault begun by bomb and shell and rifle fire,
and followed by savage rushes with the bayonet,
one of which got in, and did much slaughter.
No man slept that night; the fight hardly
slackened all through the night; at dawn the
dead were lying three deep in every part of the
line. Bombs fell every minute in some section
of the line, and where the wide Turk trenches
had been blasted open they were very destruc-
tive. The men were " extremely tired but de-
termined to hold on." They did hold on.
[They held on for the next five days and
nights, till Lone Pine was ours past question.
For those five days and nights the fight for
Lone Pine was one long personal scrimmage in
the midst of explosion. For those five days
and nights the Australians lived and ate and
slept in that gallery of the mine of death, in a
half darkness lit by great glares, in filth, heat
and corpses, among rotting and dying and mu-
tilated men, with death blasting at the doors
only a few feet away, and intense and bloody
fighting, hand to hand, with bombs, bayonets
and knives, for hours together by night and
1 66 Galllpoli
day. When the Turks gave up the struggle
the dead were five to the yard in that line or
works; they were heaped in a kind of double
wall all along the sides of the trench: most of
them were bodies of Turks, but among them
were one quarter of the total force which ran
out from The Pimple on the evening of the 6th.
Like the fight for the vineyard near Krithia,
this fight for Lone Pine kept large numbers
of Turks from the vital part of the battlefield.
When the sun set upon this battle at Lone
Pine on that first evening of the 6th of August,
many thousands of brave men fell in for the
main battle, which was to strew their glorious
bodies in the chasms of the Sari Bair, where
none but the crows would ever find them. They
fell in at the appointed places in four columns,
two to guard the flanks, two to attack. One
attacking column, guarded and helped by the
column on its right, was to move up the Chailak
and Sazli Beit Deres, to the storm of Chunuk
Bair, the other attacking column, guarded and
helped by the column on its left, was to move
up the Aghyl Dere to the storm of Sari's peak
Gallipoli 167
of Koja Chemen Tepe. The outermost, left,
guarding column (though it did not know it)
was to link up with the force soon to land at
Suvla.
They were going upon a night attack in a
country known to be a wilderness with neither
water nor way in it. They had neither light
nor guide, nor any exact knowledge of where
the darkness would burst into a blaze from the
Turk fire. Many armies have gone out into
the darkness of a night adventure, but what
army has gone out like this, from the hiding
places on a beach to the heart of unknown hills,
to wander up crags under fire, to storm a for-
tress in the dawn? Even in Manchuria, there
were roads and the traces and the comforts of
man. In this savagery, there was nothing, but
the certainty of desolation, where the wounded
would lie until they died and the dead be never
buried.
Until this campaign, the storm of Badajos
was the most desperate duty ever given to
British soldiers. The men in the forlorn hope
of that storm marched to their position to the
1 68 Gallipoli
sound of fifes " which filled the heart with a
melting sweetness " and tuned that rough com-
pany to a kind of sacred devotion. No music
played away the brave men from Anzac.
They answered to their names in the dark, and
moved off to take position for what they had
to do. Men of many races were banded
together there. t There were Australians, Eng-
lish, Indians, Maoris and New Zealanders,
made one by devotion to a cause, and all will-
ing to die that so their comrades might see the
dawn make a steel streak of the Hellespont
from the peaked hill now black against the
stars. Soon they had turned their back on
friendly little Anzac and the lights in the gul-
lies and were stepping out with the sea upon
their left and the hills of their destiny upon
their right, and the shells, starlights and battle
of Lone Pine far away behind them. Before
9 A. M. the Right Covering Column (of New
Zealanders) was in position ready to open up
the Sazli Beit and Chailak Deres, to their
brothers who were to storm Chunuk. Half an
Galllpoli 169
hour later, cunningly backed by the guns of the
destroyer Colne, they rushed the Turk position,
routed the garrison and its supports, and took
the fort known as Old No. 3 Post. It was an
immensely strong position, protected by barbed
wire, shielded by shell-proof head cover, and
mined in front " with 28 mines electrically con-
nected to a first-rate firing apparatus within."
Sed nisi Dominus.
This success opened up the Sazli Dere for
nearly half of its length.
Inland from Old No. 3 Post, and some 700
yards from it is a crag or precipice which looks
like a round table, with a top projecting beyond
its legs. This crag, known to our men as
Table Top, is a hill which few would climb for
pleasure. Nearly all the last 100 feet of the
peak is precipice, such as no mountaineer would
willingly climb without clear daylight and every
possible precaution. It is a sort of skull of
rock fallen down upon its body of rock, and
the great rocky ribs heave out with gullies be-
tween them. The table-top, or plateau-summit,
170 GalUpoli
was strongly entrenched and held by the Turks,
whose communication trenches ran down the
back of the hill to Rhododendron Spur.
While their comrades were rushing Old No.
3 Post, a party of New Zealanders marched to
storm this natural fortress. The muscular
part of the feat may be likened to the climbing
of the Welsh Glyddyrs, the Irish Lurig, or the
craggier parts of the American Palisades, in
a moonless midnight, under a load of not less
than thirty pounds. But the muscular effort
was made much greater by the roughness of the
unknown approaches, which led over glidders
of loose stones into the densest of short, thick,
intensely thorny scrub. The New Zealanders
advanced under fire through this scrub, went
up the rocks in a spirit which no crag could
daunt, reached the Table-top, rushed the Turk
trenches, killed some Turks of the garrison and
captured the rest with all their stores.
This success opened up the remainder of the
Sazli Beit Dere.
While these attacks were progressing, the
remainder of the Right Covering Column
Galli poll 171
marched north to the Chailak Dere. A large
body crossed this Dere and marched on, but the
rest turned up the Dere and soon came to a
barbed wire entanglement which blocked the
ravine. They had met the Turks' barbed wire
before, on Anzac Day, and had won through
it, but this wire in the Dere was new to their
experience; it was meant rather as a permanent
work than as an obstruction. It was secured
to great balks or blinders of pine, six or eight
feet high, which stood in a rank twenty or
thirty deep right across the ravine. The wire
which crossed and criss-crossed between these
balks was as thick as a man's thumb and pro-
fusely barbed. Beyond it lay a flanking trench,
held by a strong outpost of Turks, who at once
opened fire. This, though not unexpected, was
a difficult barrier to come upon in the darkness
of a summer night, and here, as before, at the
landing of the Worcester Regiment at W beach,
men went forward quietly, without weapons, to
cut the wire for the others. They were shot
down, but others took their places, though the
Turks, thirty steps away on the other side of
172 Gal lip oli
the gulley, had only to hold their rifles steady
and pull their triggers to destroy them. This
holding up in the darkness by an unseen hidden
enemy and an obstacle which needed high ex-
plosive shell in quantity caused heavy loss and
great delay. For a time there was no getting
through; but then with the most desperate
courage and devotion, a party of engineers
cleared the obstacle, the Turks were routed,
and a path made for the attackers.
This success opened up the mouth of the
Chailak Dere.
Meanwhile those who had marched across
this Dere and gone on towards Suvla, swung
round to the right to clear the ^Turks from
Bauchop's Hill, which overlooks the Chailak
Dere from the north. Bauchop's Hill (a
rough country even for Gallipoli) is cleft by
not less than twenty great gullies, most of them
forked, precipitous, overgrown and heaped with
rocks. The New Zealanders scrambled up it
from the north, got into a maze of trenches,
not strongly held, beat the Turks out of them,
wandered south across the neck or ridge of the
GaUipoli 173
hill, discovering Turk trenches by their fire, and
at last secured the whole hill.
This success, besides securing the Chailak
Dere from any assault from the north, secured
the south flank of the Aghyl Dere beyond it.
Meanwhile the Left Covering Column
(mainly Welshmen) which for some time had
halted at Old No. 3 Post, waiting for the
sound of battle to tell them that the Turks on
Bauchop's Hill were engaged, marched boldly
on the Aghyl Dere, crossed it in a rush, taking
every Turk trench in the way, then stormed the
Turk outpost on Damakjelik Bair, going on
from trench to trench in the dark guided by the
flashes of the rifles, till the whole hill was theirs.
This success opened up the Aghyl Dere to the
attacking column.
As the troops drew their breath in the still
night on the little hill which they had won, they
heard about three miles away a noise of battle
on the seacoast to their left. This noise was
not the nightly " hate " of the monitors and
destroyers but an irregular and growing rifle
fire. This, though they did not know it, was
174 Gallipoli
the beginning of the landing of the new Divi-
sions, with their 30,000 men, at Suvla Bay.
For the moment, Suvla was not the important
point in the battle. The three Deres were the
important points, for up the three Deres, now
cleared of Turks, our Attacking Columns were
advancing to the assault.
By this time however, the Turks were roused
throughout their line. All the Anzac position
from Tasmania Post to Table Top was a blaze
of battle to contain them before our trenches,
but they knew now that their right was threat-
ened and their reserves were hurrying out to
meet us before we had gained the crests. Our
Right Attacking Column (of English and New
Zealand troops) went up the Sazli Beit and
Chailak Deres, deployed beyond Table Top
and stormed Rhododendron Spur, fighting for
their lives every inch of the way. The Left
Column (mainly Indians and Australians)
pressed up the Aghyl, into the stony clefts of
its upper forks, and so, by rock, jungle, heart-
breaking cliff and fissure to the attack of Hill
Q, and the lower slopes of Sari. They, too,
Gallipoli 175
were fighting for their lives. Their advance
was across a scrub peopled now by little clumps
of marksmen firing from hiding. When they
deployed out of the Deres, to take up their
line of battle, they linked up with the Right
Assaulting Column, and formed with them a
front of about a mile, stretching from the old
Anzac position to within a mile of the crests
which were the prize. By this time the night
was over, day was breaking, the Turks were
in force, and our attacking columns much ex-
hausted, but there was still breath for a last
effort. Now, with the breath, came a quick
encouragement, for looking down from their
hillsides they could see Suvla Bay full of ships,
the moving marks of boats, dotted specks of
men on the sandhills, and more ships on the
sea marching like chariots to the cannon. In
a flash, as happens when many minds are tense
together, they realised the truth. A new land-
ing was being made. All along the coast by
the Bay the crackle and the flash of firing was
moving from the sea, to shew them that the
landing was made good, and that the L Turks
176 Gallipoli
were falling back. Hardening their hearts at
this sight of help coming from the sea the Aus-
tralians and Sikhs with the last of their strength
went at Koja Chemen Tepe, and the New Zea-
landers upon their right rose to the storm of
Chunuk.
It was not to be. The guns behind them
backed them. They did what mortal men
could do, but they were worn out by the night's
advance, they could not carry the two summits.
They tried a second time to carry Chunuk; but
they were too weary and the Turks in too great
strength; they could not get to the top. But
they held to what they had won ; they entrenched
themselves on the new line, and there they
stayed, making ready for the next attack.
Two or three have said to me : (l< They
ought not to have been exhausted; none of them
had marched five miles." It is difficult to
answer such critics patiently, doubly difficult to
persuade them, without showing them the five
miles. There comes into my mind, as I write,
the image of some hills in the west of Ireland,
a graceful and austere range, not difficult to
Gallipoli 177
climb, seemingly, and not unlike these Gallipoli
hills, in their look of lying down at rest. The
way to those hills is over some miles of scat-
tered limestone blocks, with gaps between them
full of scrub, gorse, heather, dwarf-ash and
little hill-thorn, and the traveller proceeds, as
the Devil went through Athlone, " in standing
lepps." This journey to the hills is the likest
journey (known to me) to that of the assault-
ing columns. Like the Devil in Athlone the
assaulting columns had often to advance " in
standing lepps," but to them the standing lepp
came as a solace, a rare, strange and blessed
respite, from forcing through scrub by main
strength, or scaling a crag of rotten sandstone,
in pitch darkness, in the presence of an enemy.
For an armed force to advance a mile an hour
by day over such a country is not only good
going, but a great achievement; to advance four
miles in a night over such a country, fighting
literally all the way, often hand to hand, and
to feel the enemy's resistance stiffening and his
reserves arriving, as the strength fails and the
ascent steepens, and yet to make an effort at
178 Galllpoli
the end, is a thing unknown in the history of
war. And this first fourteen hours of exhaust-
ing physical labour was but the beginning.
The troops, as they very well knew, were to
have two or three days more of the same toil
before the battle could be ended, one way or
the other. So after struggling for fourteen
hours with every muscle in their bodies, over
crags and down gullies in the never-ceasing
peril of death, they halted in the blaze of noon
and drew their breath. In the evening, as they
hoped, the men from Suvla would join hands
and go on to victory with them ; they had fought
the first stage of the battle, the next stage was
to be decisive.
The heat of this noon of August yth on
those sandy hills was a scarcely bearable tor-
ment.
Meanwhile, at Suvla, the left of the battle,
the nth Division, had landed in the pitch-dark-
ness, by wading ashore, in five feet of water,
under rifle fire, on to beaches prepared with
land mines. The first boat-loads lost many
Gallipoli 179
men from the mines and from the fire of snipers,
who came right down to the beach in the dark-
ness and fired from the midst of our men.
These snipers were soon bayoneted, our men
formed for the assault in the dark and stormed
the Turk outpost on Lala Baba there and then.
While Lala Baba was being cleared other bat-
talions moved north to clear the Turk from
the neighbourhood of the beach on that side.
The ground over which they had to move is a
sand-dune-land, covered with gorse and other
scrub, most difficult to advance across in a wide
extension. About half a mile from the beach
the ground rises in a roll of whale-back, known
on the battle plans as Hill 10. This hill is
about three hundred yards long and thirty feet
high. At this whale-back (which was en-
trenched) the Turks rallied on their supports;
they had, perhaps, a couple of thousand men
and (some say) a gun or two, and the dawn
broke before they could be rushed. Their first
shells upon our men set fire to the gorse, so
that our advance against them was through a
blazing common in which many men who fell
i8o Gallipoli
wounded were burnt to death or suffocated.
The Turks, seeing the difficulties of the men
in the fire, charged with the bayonet, but were
themselves charged and driven back in great
disorder; the fire spread to their hill and
burned them out of it. Our men then began to
drive the Turks away from the high ridges to
the north of Suvla. The loth Division began
to land while this fight was still in progress.
This early fighting had won for us a landing-
place at Suvla and had cleared the ground to
the north of the bay for the deployment for the
next attack. This was to be a swinging round
of two Brigades to the storm of the hills di-
rectly to the east of the Salt Lake. [These hills
are the island-like double-peaked Chocolate
Hill (close to the lake) and the much higher
and more important hills of Scimitar Hill (or
Hill 70) and Ismail Oglu Tepe (Hill 100)
behind it. The Brigade chosen for this attack
were the 3ist (consisting of Irish Regiments)
belonging to the loth Division, and the 32nd
(consisting of Yorkshire and North of Eng-
land Regiments) belonging to the nth Divi-
Gallipoli 181
sion. The 32nd had been hotly engaged since
the very early morning, the 3ist were only just
on shore. The storm was to be pushed from
the north, and would, if successful, clear the
way for the final thrust, the storm of Koja-
Chemen Tepe from the northwest.
This thrust from Suvla against Koja Chemen
was designed to complete and make decisive the
thrust already begun by the Right and Left At-
tacking Columns. The attack on Chocolate
Hill, Scimitar Hill and Ismail Oglu was to
make that thrust possible by destroying forever
the power of the Turk to parry it. The Turk
could only parry it by firing from those hills
on the men making it. It was therefore neces-
sary to seize those hills before the Turk could
stop us. If the Jurks seized those hills be-
fore us, or stopped us from seizing them, our
troops could not march from Suvla to take part
in the storm of Koja Chemen. If we seized
them before the Turks, then the Turks could
not stop us from crossing the valley to that
storm. The first problem at Suvla therefore
was not so much to win a battle as to win a
1 82 Galllpoll
race with the Turks for the possession of those
hills; the winning of the battle could be ar-
ranged later. Our failure to win that race
brought with it our loss of the battle. The
next chapter in the story of the battle is simply
a description of the losing of a race by loss of
time.
Now the giving of praise or blame is always
easy, but the understanding of anything is diffi-
cult. The understanding of anything so vast,
so confused, so full of contradiction, so depend-
ent on little things (themselves changing from
minute to minute, the coward of a moment ago
blazing out into a hero at the next turn) as a
modern battle is more than difficult. But
some attempt must be made to understand how
it came about that time was lost at Suvla, be-
tween the landing, at midnight on the 6th-yth
August, and the arrival of the Turks upon the
hills, at midnight on the 8th~9th.
In the first place it should be said that the
beaches of Suvla are not the beaches of sea-
side resorts, all pleasant smooth sand and
shingle. They are called beaches because they
Gallipoli 183
cannot well be called cliffs. They slope into
the sea with some abruptness, in pentes of rock
and tumbles of sand-dune difficult to land upon
from boats. From them, one climbs onto sand-
dune, into a sand-dune land, which is like noth-
ing so much as a sea-marsh from which the
water has receded. Walking on this soft sand
is difficult, it is like walking in feathers; work-
ing, hauling and carrying upon it is very diffi-
cult. Upon this coast and country, roadless,
wharfless, beachless and unimproved, nearly
30,000 men landed in the first ten hours of
August 7th. At 10 A. M., on that day, when
the sun was in his stride, the difficulty of those
beaches began to tell on those upon them.
There had been sharp fighting on and near the
beaches, and shells were still falling here and
there in all the ground which we had won.
On and near the beaches there was a congestion
of a very hindering kind. With men coming
ashore, shells bursting among them, mules
landing, biting, kicking, shying and stamped-
ing, guns limbering up and trying to get out
into position, more men coming ashore or seek-
1 84 Gallipoli
ing for the rest of their battalion in a crowd
where all battalions looked alike, shouts, or-
ders and counter-orders, ammunition boxes be-
ing passed along, water carts and transport be-
ing started for the firing line, wounded coming
down or being helped down, or being loaded
into lighters, doctors trying to clear the way for
field dressing stations, with every now and then
a shell from Ismail sending the sand in clouds
over corpses, wounded men and fatigue parties,
and a blinding August sun over all to exhaust
and to madden, it was not possible to avoid con-
gestion. This congestion was the first, but not
the most fatal cause of the loss of time.
Though the congestion was an evil in itself,
its first evil effect was that it made it impossi-
ble to pass orders quickly from one part of the
beach to another. In this first matter of the
attack on the hills, the way had been opened for
the assault by 10 A. M. at the latest but to get
through the confusion along the beaches
(among battalions landing, forming and defil-
ing, and the waste of wounded momently in-
creasing) to arrange for the assault and to
Gallipoli 185
pass the orders to the battalions named for the
duty, took a great deal of time. It was nearly
i P. M. when the 3ist moved north from Lala
Baba on their march round the head of the Salt
Lake into position for the attack. The 32nd
Brigade, having fought since dawn at Hill 10,
was already to the north of the Salt Lake, but
when (at about 3 P. M.) the 3ist took position,
facing southeast, with its right on the north-
east corner of the Salt Lake, the 32nd was not
upon its left ready to advance with it. In-
stead of that guard upon its left the 3ist found
a vigorous attack of Turks. More time was
lost, waiting for support to reach the left, and
before it arrived, word game that the attack
upon the hills was to be postponed till after
5 P. M. Seeing the danger of delay and that
Chocolate Hill at least should be seized at
once, the Brigadier General (Hill) telephoned
for supports and covering fire, held off the at-
tack on his left with one battalion, and with the
rest of his Brigade started at once to take
Chocolate Hill, cost what it might. The men
went forward and stormed Chocolate Hill, the
1 86 Gallipoli
7th Royal Dublin Fusiliers bearing the brunt of
the storm.
At some not specified time, perhaps after this
storm, in a general retirement of the Turks,
Hill 70, or Scimitar Hill, was abandoned to us,
and occupied by an English battalion.
During all this day of the 7th of August all
our men suffered acutely from the great heat
and from thirst. Several men went raving
mad from thirst, others assaulted the water
guards, pierced the supply hoses, or swam to
the lighters to beg for water. Thirst in great
heat is a cruel pain, and this (afflicting some
regiments more than others) demoralised some
and exhausted all. Efforts were made to send
up and to find water; but the distribution sys-
tem, beginning on a cluttered beach and end-
ing in a rough, unknown country full of con-
fused fighting and firing, without anything like
a road, and much of it blazing or smouldering
from the scrub fires, broke down, and most of
the local wells, when discovered, were filled
with corpses put there by the Turk garrison.
Some unpolluted wells of drinkable, though
Gallipoli 187
brackish water, were found, but most of these
were guarded by snipers, who shot at men go-
ing to them. Many men were killed thus and
many more wounded, for the Turk snipers were
good shots, cleverly hidden.
All through the day in the Suvla area, thirst,
due to the great heat, was another cause of loss
of time in the fulfilment of that part of the
tactical scheme; but it was not the final and
fatal cause.
Chocolate Hill was taken by our men (now
utterly exhausted by thirst and heat) just as
darkness fell. They were unable to go on
against Ismail Oglu Tepe. They made their
dispositions for the night on the line they had
won, sent back to the beaches for ammuni-
tion, food and water, and tried to forget their
thirst. They were in bad case, and still two
miles from the Australians below Koja Chemen
Tepe. Very late that night word reached them
that the Turks were massed in a gulley to their
front, that no other enemy reserves were any-
where visible, and that the Turks had with-
drawn their guns, fearing that they would be
1 88 Gallipoli
taken next morning. Before dawn on the all-
important day of the 8th August, our men at
Suvla after a night of thirst and sniping, stood
to arms to help out the vital thrust of the
battle.
Had time not been lost on the 7th, their task
on the 8th would have been to cross the valley
at dawn, join the Australians and go with them
up the spurs to victory, in a strength which the
Turks could not oppose. At dawn on the 8th
their path to the valley was still barred by the
uncaptured Turk fort on Ismail; time had been
lost; there could be no crossing the valley till
Ismail was taken. There was still time to take
it and cross the valley to the storm, but the
sands were falling. Up on Chunuk already
the battle had begun without them; no time was
lost on Chunuk.
Up on Chunuk at that moment a very bitter
battle was being fought. On the right, on
Chunuk itself, the Gloucester and New Zea-
land Regiments were storming the hill, in the
centre and on the left the Australians, English,
and Indians were trying for Hill Q and the
Gallipoli 189
south of Koja Chemen. They had passed the
night on the hillsides under a never-ceasing fire
of shells and bullets, now, before dawn, they
were making a terrible attempt. Those on
Chunuk went up with a rush, pelted from in
front and from both flanks by every engine of
death. The Gloucesters were on the left and
the New Zealanders on the right in this great
assault. They deployed past The Farm and
then went on to the storm of a hill which rises
some four hundred feet in as many yards.
They were on the top by dawn; Chunuk Bair,
the last step, but one, to victory, was ours and
remained ours all day, but at a cost which few
successful attacks have ever known. By four
o'clock that afternoon the New Zealanders had
dwindled to three officers and fifty men, and
the Gloucester battalion, having lost every offi-
cer and senior non-commissioned officer, was
fighting under section-leaders and privates.
Still, their attack had succeeded; they were con-
querors. In the centre the attack on Hill Q
was less successful. There the English and
Indian regiments, assaulting together, were
190 Gallipoli
held; the Turks were too strong. Our men
got up to the top of the lower spurs, and there
had to lie down and scrape cover, for there was
no going further. On the left of our attack the
Australians tried to storm the Abd-el-Rahman
Bair from the big gulley of Asma Dere. They
went up in the dark with Australian dash to a
venture pretty desperate even for Gallipoli.
The Turks held the high ground on both sides
of the Asma gulley, and were there in great
force with many machine guns. The Austral-
ians were enfiladed, held in front, and taken in
reverse, and (as soon as it was light enough
for the Turks to see) they suffered heavily.
As one of the Australians has described it:
"The I4th and I5th Battalions moved out in
single file and deployed to the storm and an
advance was made under heavy rifle and ma-
chine gun fire. After the I5th Battalion had
practically withered away, the I4th continued
to advance, suffering heavily, and the Turks in
great force. As we drove them back, they
counter attacked, several times. The Bat-
Gallipoli 191
talion thus got very split up and it is impossible
to say exactly what happened."
It is now possible to say exactly that that
1 4th Battalion fought like heroes in little bands
of wounded and weary men, and at last, with
great reluctance, on repeated orders, fell back
to the Asma Dere from which they had come,
beating off enemy attacks all the way down the
hill, and then held on, against all that the Turk
could do.
By noon, this assault, which would have been
decisive had the men from Suvla been engaged
with the Australians, was at an end. Its right
had won Chunuk, and could just hold on to
what it had won, its centre was held, and its
left driven back. The fire upon all parts of
the line was terrific; our men were lying (for
the most part) in scratchings of cover, for they
could not entrench under fire so terrible. Often
in that rough and tumble country, the snipers
and bombers of both sides, were within a few
yards of each other, and in the roar and blast
of the great battle were countless little battles,
192 Gallipoli
or duels to the death, which made the ground
red and set the heather on fire. Half of the
hills of that accursed battlefield, too false of
soil to be called crags and too savage with
desolation to be called hills, such as feed the
sheep and bees of England, were blazing in
sweeps of flame, which cast up smoke to heaven,
and swept in great swathes across the gullies.
Shells from our ships were screaming and burst-
ing among all that devil's playground; it was an
anxious time for the Turks. Many a time
throughout that day the Turkish officers must
have looked down anxiously upon the Suvla
plain to see if our men there were masters of
Ismail and on the way to Koja Chemen. For
the moment, as they saw, we were held; but not
more than held. With a push from Suvla to
help us, we could not be held. Our men on the
hills, expecting that helping push, drew breath
for a new assault.
It was now noon. The battle so far was in
our favour. We had won ground, some of it
an all-important ground, and for once we had
the Turks with their backs against the wall and
Gallipoli 193
short of men. At Helles they were pressed, at
Lone Pine they were threatened at the heart,
under Koja Chemen the knife point was touch-
ing the heart, and at Suvla was the new strength
to drive the knife point home and begin the
end of the war. And the Turks could not stop
that new strength. Their nearest important
reserve of men was at Eski Kevi, ten miles away
by a road which could scarcely be called a goat
track, and these reserves had been called on
for the fight at Krithia, and still more for the
two days of struggle at Lone Pine. All
through that day of the eighth of August Fate
waited to see what would happen between Suvla
and Koja Chemen. She fingered with her dice
uncertain which side to favour; she waited to
be courted by the one who wanted her. Eight
hours of daylight had gone by, but there was
still no moving forward from Suvla, to seize
Ismail and pass from it across the valley to the
storm. Noon passed into the afternoon, but
there was still no movement. Four hours
more went by, and now our aeroplanes brought
word that the Turks near Suvla were moving
194 Gallipoli
back their guns by ox-teams, and that their foot
were on the march, coming along their break-
neck road, making perhaps a mile an hour, but
marching and drawing steadily nearer to the
threatened point. The living act of the battle
was due at Ismail : from Ismail the last act, the
toppling down of the Turk forever among the
bones of his victims and the ruin of his ally,
would have been prepared and assured. There
was a desultory fire around Ismail, and the
smoke of scrub fires which blazed and smoul-
dered everywhere as far as the eye could see,
but no roar and blaze and outcry of a meant
attack. The battle hung fire on the left, the
hours were passing, the Turks were coming.
It was only five o'clock still ; we had still seven
hours or more. In the centre we had almost
succeeded. We could hang on there and try
again, there was still time. The chance which
had been plainly ours, was still an even chance.
It was for the left to seize it for us, the battle
waited for the left, the poor, dying Gloucesters
and Wellingtons hung on to Chunuk for it, the
Gurkhas and English in the trampled corn-
Galllpoli 195
fields near The Farm died where they lay on
the chance of it, the Australians on Abd-el-
Rahman held steady in the hope of it, under
a fire that filled the air.
If, as men say, the souls of a race, all the
company of a nation's dead, rally to the liv-
ing of their people in a time of storm, those
fields of hell below Koja Chemen, won by the
sweat and blood and dying agony of our thou-
sands, must have answered with a ghostly
muster of English souls in the afternoon of that
eighth of August. There was the storm, there
was the crisis, the one picked hour, to which
this death and mangling and dying misery and
exultation had led. Then was the hour for a
casting off of self, and a setting aside of every
pain and longing and sweet affection, a giving
up of all that makes a man to be something
which makes a race, and a going forward to
death resolvedly to help out their brothers high
up above in the shell bursts and the blazing
gorse. Surely all through the eighth of August
our unseen dead were on that field, blowing the
horn of Roland, the unheard, unheeded horn,
196 Gallipoli
the horn of heroes in the dolorous pass, asking
for the little that heroes ask, but asking in vain.
If ever the great of England cried from be-
yond death to the living they cried then. " De
50 qui calt. Demuret i unt trop."
All through the morning of that day, the
Commander-in-Chief, on watch at his central
station, had waited with growing anxiety for the
advance from the Suvla Beaches. Till the aft-
ernoon the critical thrust on Chunuk and the
great Turk pressure at Lone Pine made it im-
possible for him to leave his post to intervene,
but, in the afternoon, seeing that neither wire-
less nor telephone messages could take the
place of personal vision and appeal, he took
the risk of cutting himself adrift from the main
conflict, hurried to Suvla, landed, and found
the great battle of the war, that should have
brought peace to all that Eastern world, being
lost by minutes before his eyes.
Only one question mattered then : " Was
there still time? " Had the Turks made good
their march and crowned those hills, or could
our men forestall them? It was now doubt-
Gal lip oil 197
ful, but the point was vital, not only to the
battle, but to half the world in travail. If had
to be put to the test. A hundred years ago,
perhaps even fifty years ago, all could have
been saved. Often in those old days, a Com-
mander-in-Chief could pull a battle out of the
fire and bring halted or broken troops to vic-
tory. L Then, by waving a sword, and shouting
a personal appeal, the resolute soul could pluck
the hearts of his men forward in a rush that
nothing could stem. So Wolfe took Quebec, so
Desaix won Marengo, so Bonaparte swept the
bridge at Lodi and won at Arcola; so Caesar
overcame the Nervii in the terrible day, and
wrecked the Republic at Pharsalia. So Sher-
man held the landing at Shiloh and Farragut
pitted his iron heart against iron ships at Fort
Jackson. So Sir Ian Hamilton himself snatched
victory from the hesitation at Elandslaagte.
Then the individual's will could take instant
effect, but then the individual's front was not a
five mile front of wilderness, the men were un-
der his hand, within sight and sound of him
and not committed by order to another tactical
198 Gallipoli
project. There, at Suvla, there was no chance
for these heroic methods. Suvla was the mod-
ern battle field, where nothing can be done
quickly except the firing of a machine gun. On
the modern field, especially on such a field as
Suvla, where the troops were scattered in the
wilderness, it may take several hours for an
order to pass from one wing to the other. In
this case it was not an order that was to pass,
but a counter-order; the order had already
gone, for an attack at dawn on the morrow.
All soldiers seem agreed, that even with
authority to back it, a counter-order, on a mod-
ern battlefield, to urge forward halted troops,
takes time to execute. Sir Ian Hamilton's .de-
termination to seize those hills could not spare
the time ; too much time had already gone. He
ordered an advance at all costs with whatever
troops were not scattered, but only four bat-
talions could be found in any way ready to
move. It was now 5 P. M. : there were perhaps
three more hours of light. The four battal-
ions were ordered to advance at once to make
good what they could of the hills fronting the
Galli poll 199
bay before the urks forestalled them. At
dawn the general attack as already planned was
to support them. Unfortunately the four bat-
talions were less ready than was thought; they
were not able to advance at once, nor for ten
all-precious hours. They did not begin to ad-
vance till 4 o'clock the next morning (the 9th
of August) and even then the rest of the Divi-
sion which was to support them was not in con-
cert with them. They attacked the hills to the
north of Anafarta Sagir, but they were now too
late, the Turks were there before them, in great
force, with their guns, and the thrust, which
the day before could have been met by (at most)
five Turk battalions without artillery was now
parried and thwarted. Presently the Division
attacked with great gallantry, over burning
scrub, seized Ismail and was then checked and
forced back to the Chocolate Hills. The left
had failed. t The main blow of the battle on
Sari Bair was to have no support from Suvla.
The main blow was given, none the less, by
the troops near Chunuk. Three columns were
formed in the pitchy blackness of the very early
2OO Gallipoli
morning of the 9th, two to seize and clear
Chunuk and Hill Q, the third to pass from Hill
Q on the wave of the assault to the peak of
Koja Chemen. The first two columns were on
the lower slopes of Chunuk and in the fields
about The Farm, with orders to attack at dawn.
The third column consisting wholly of English
troops was not yet on the ground, but moving
during the night up the Chailak Dere. [The
Dere was jammed with pack-mules, ammuni-
tion and wounded men; it was pitch dark and
the column made bad going, and those leading
it were doubtful of the way. Brigadier-Gen-
eral Baldwin, who commanded, left his Brigade
in the Dere, went to the Headquarters of the
ist column, and brought back guides to lead his
Brigade into position. The guides led him on
in the darkness, till they realised that they' were
lost. The Brigadier marched his men back to
the Chailak, and then, still in pitch darkness,
up a nullah into the Aghyl Dere, and from
there, in growing light, towards The Farm.
This wandering in the darkness had tragical
results.
Galli poll 20 1
At half-past four the guns from the ships and
the army opened on Chunuk, and the columns
moved to the assault. Soon the peaks of their
objective were burning like the hills of hell to
light them on their climb to death, and they
went up in the half-darkness to the storm of
a volcano spouting fire, driving the Turks be-
fore them. Some of the Warwicks and South
Lancashires were the first upon the top of
Chunuk; Major Allanson, leading the 6th
Gurkhas, was the first on the ridge between
Chunuk and Hill Q. Up on the crests came
the crowding sections; the Turks were break-
ing and falling back. Our men passed over the
crests and drove the Turks down on the other
side. Victory was flooding up over Chunuk
like the Severn tide : our men had scaled the
scarp, and there below them lay the ditch, the
long grey streak of the Hellespont, the victory
and the reward of victory. The battle lay like
a field ripe to the harvest, our men had but to
put in the sickle. The Third Column was the
sickle of that field, that Third Column which
had lost its way in the blackness of the wilder-
2O2 Gallipoli
ness. Even now that Third Column was com-
ing up the hill below; in a few minutes it
would have been over the crest, going on to
victory with the others. Then, at that moment
of time, while our handful on the hilltop
waited for the weight of the Third Column to
make its thrust a death-blow, came the most
tragical thing in all that tragical campaign.
It was barely daylight when our men won
the hilltop. The story is that our men moving
on the crest were mistaken for Turks, or (as
some think) that there was some difference in
officers' watches, some few minutes' delay in be-
ginning the fire of the guns, and therefore some
few minutes' delay in stopping the bombard-
ment, which had been ordered to continue upon
the crest for three-quarters of an hour from
4.30 A. M. Whatever the cause, whether ac-
cident, fate, mistake, or the daily waste and
confusion of battle, our own guns searched the
hill-top for some minutes too long, and thinned
out our brave handful with a terrible fire. They
were caught in the open and destroyed there;
the Turks charged back upon the remnant and
Gallipoli 203
beat them off the greater part of the crest.
Only a few minutes after this the Third Column
came into action in support : too late.
The Turks beat them down the hill to The
Farm, but could not drive the men of the First
Column from the southwestern half of the top
of the Chunuk. All through the hard and
bloody day of the 9th of August the Turks tried
to carry this peak, but never quite could, though
the day was one long succession of Turk at-
tacks, the Turks fresh and in great strength,
our men weary from three terrible days and
nights and only a battalion strong, since the
peak would not hold more. The New Zealand-
ers and some of the I3th Division held that end
of Chunuk. They were in trenches which had
been dug under fire, partly by themselves, partly
by the Turks. In most places these trenches
were only scratchings in the ground, since
neither side on that blazing and stricken hill
could stand to dig. Here and there, in shel-
tered patches, the trenches were three feet deep,
but whether three feet deep or three inches, all
were badly sited, and in some parts had only
204 Gallipoli
ten yards field of fire. In these pans or scratch-
ings our men fought all day, often hand to
hand, usually under a pelt of every kind of
fire, often amid a shower of bombs since the
Turks could creep up under cover to within
so few yards. Our men lost very heavily
during the day but at nightfall we still held the
peak. After dark the 6th Loyal North Lan-
cashires relieved the garrison, took over the
trenches, did what they could to strengthen
them, and advanced them by some yards here
and there. At four o'clock on the morning of
the loth, the 5th Wiltshires came up to sup-
port them and lay down behind the trenches in
the ashes, sand and scattered rubble of the hill-
top. Both battalions were exhausted from four
days and nights of continual fighting, but in
very good heart. At this time, these two bat-
talions marked the extreme right of our new
line ; on their left, stretching down to The Farm,
were the loth Hampshires, and near The Farm
the remains of the Third Column under Gen-
eral Baldwin. There may have been in all
some five thousand men on Chunuk and within
Gal lip oli 205
a quarter of a mile of it round The Farm.
In the darkness before dawn when our men
on the hill were busy digging themselves bet-
ter cover for the day's battle, the Turks, now
strongly reinforced from Bulair and Asia, as-
saulted Chunuk with not less than 15,000 men.
L They came on in a monstrous mass, packed
shoulder to shoulder, in some places eight deep,
in others three or four deep. Practically all
their first line were shot by our men, prac-
tically all the second line were bayoneted, but
the third line got into our trenches and over-
whelmed the garrison. Our men fell back to
the second line of trenches and rallied and fired,
but the Turks overwhelmed that line too and
then with their packed multitude they paused
and gathered like a wave, burst down on the
Wiltshire Regiment, and destroyed it almost
to a man. Even so, the survivors, outnum-
bered 40 to i, formed and charged with the
bayonet, and formed and charged a second
time, with a courage which makes the charge
of the Light Brigade seem like a dream. But
it was a hopeless position, the Turks came on
206 Gallipoli
like the sea, beat back all before them, paused
for a moment, set rolling down the hill upon
our men a number of enormous round bombs,
which bounded into our lines and burst, and
then following up this artillery they fell on the
men round The Farm in the most bloody and
desperate fight of the campaign.
Even as they topped Chunuk and swarmed
down to engulf our right, our guns opened upon
them in a fire truly awful, but thousands came
alive over the crest and went down to the bat-
tle below. Stragglers running from the first
rush put a panic in the Aghyl Dere, where bear-
ers, doctors, mules and a multitude of wounded
were jammed up with soldiers trying to get up
to the fight. Some of our men held up against
this thrust of the Turks, and in that first brave
stand, General Baldwin was killed. Then our
line broke, the Turks got fairly in among our
men with a weight which bore all before it,
and what followed was a long succession of
British rallies to a tussle body to body, with
knives and stones and teeth, a fight of wild
beasts in the ruined cornfields of The Farm.
Gallipoli 207
Nothing can be said of that fight, no words can
describe nor any mind imagine it, except as a
roaring and blazing hour of killing. Our last
reserves came up to it, and the Turks were
beaten back; very few of their men reached
their lines alive. The Turk dead lay in thou-
sands all down the slopes of the hill; but the
crest of the hill, the prize, remained in Turk
hands, not in ours.
That ended the battle of the 6th-ioth of
August. We had beaten off the Turks, but our
men were too much exhausted to do more.
They could not go up the hill again. Our
thrust at Sari Bair had failed. It had just
failed, by a few minutes, though unsupported
from the left. Even then, at the eleventh hour,
two fresh battalions and a ton of water would
have made Chunuk ours, but we had neither
the men nor the water; Sari was not to be our
hill. Our men fought for four days and nights
in a wilderness of gorse and precipice to make
her ours. They fought in a blazing sun, with-
out rest, with little food and with almost no
water, on hills on fire and on crags rotting to
208 Gallipoli
the tread. They went, like all their brothers
in that Peninsula, on a forlorn hope, and by
bloody pain they won the image and the taste
of victory, and then, when their reeling bodies
had burst the bars, so that our race might pass
through, there were none to pass, the door was
open, but there were none to go through it to
triumph, and then, slowly, as strength failed,
the door was shut again, the bars were forged
again, victory was hidden again, all was to do
again, and our brave men were but the fewer
and the bitterer for all their bloody sacrifice
for the land they served. All was to do again
after the loth of August, the great battle of
the campaign was over. We had made our
fight, we had seen our enemy beaten and the
prize displayed, and then (as before at Helles)
we had to stop for want of men, till the enemy
had remade his army and rebuilt his fort.
VI
The day passed, the night came, the King lay down
in his vaulted room. St. Gabriel came from God to
call him. " Charles, summon the army of your empire
and go by forced marches into the land of Eire, to the
city that the pagans have besieged. The Christians
call and cry for you." The Emperor wished not to go.
" God," he said, " how painful is my life." He wept
from his eyes, he tore his white beard."
The end of the Song of Roland.
THAT, in a way, was the end of the campaign,
for no other attempt to win through was made.
The Turks were shaken to the heart. Another
battle following at once might well have broken
them. But we had not the men nor the shells
for another battle. In the five days' battle
on the front of twelve miles we had lost very
little less than a quarter of our entire army,
and we had shot away most of our always
scanty supply of ammunition. We could not
attack again till fifty thousand more men were
landed and the store of shells replenished.
Those men and shells were not near Gallipoli,
but in England, where the war as a whole had
to be considered. The question to be decided,
by those directing the war as a whole, was,
"should those men and shells be sent?" It
was decided by the High Direction, that they
should not be sent: the effort therefore could not
be made.
211
212 Gallipoli
Since the effort could not be made, the cam-
paign declined into a secondary operation, to
contain large reserves of Turks, with their guns
and munitions, from use elsewhere, in Meso-
potamia or in the Caucasus. But before it be-
came this, a well-planned and well-fought effort
was made from Suvla to secure our position by
seizing the hills to the east of the Bay. This
attack took place on the 2ist August, in intense
heat, across an open plain without cover of any
kind, blazing throughout nearly all its length
with scrub fires. The 29th Division (brought
up from Cape Helles) carried Scimitar Hill
with great dash, and was then held up. The
attack on Ismail Oglu failed. Two thrusts
made by the men of Anzac in the latter days
of August, secured an important well, and the
Turk stronghold of Hill 60. This last suc-
cess made the line from Anzac to Suvla im-
pregnable.
After this, since no big attempt could be made
by the Allied Troops and no big attempt was
made by the enemy, the fighting settled down
into trench warfare on both sides. There was
Gallipoli 213
some shelling every day and night, some ma-
chine gun and rifle fire, much sniping, great
vigilance, and occasional bombing and mining.
The dysentery, which had been present ever
since the heats began, increased beyond all
measure; very few men in all that army were
not attacked and weakened by it. Many thou-
sands went down with it; Mudros, Alexan-
dria and Malta were filled with cases; many
died.
Those who remained, besides carrying on the
war by daily and nightly fire, worked continu-
ally with pick and shovel to improve the lines.
Long after the war, the goatherd on Gallipoli
will lose his way in the miles of trenches which
zigzag from Cape Helles to Achi Baba and
from Gaba Tepe to Ejelmer Bay. They run
to and fro in all that expanse of land, some of
them shallow, others deep cuttings in the marl,
many of them paved with stone or faced with
concrete, most of them sided with little caverns,
leading far down (in a few cases) to rooms
twenty feet under the ground. Long after we
are all dust the goats of Gallipoli will break
214 Gallipoli
their legs in those pits and ditches, and over
their coffee round the fire the elders will say
that they were dug by devils and the sons of
devils, and antiquarians will come from the
west to dig there, and will bring away shards
of iron, and empty tins and bones. Fifty years
ago some French staff officers traced out the
works round Durazzo, where Pompey the
Great fought just such another campaign, two
thousand years ago. Two thousand years
hence, when this war is forgotten, those lines
under the ground will draw the staff officers
of whatever country is then the most cried for
brains.
Those lines were the homes of thousands of
our soldiers for half a year and more. There
they lived and did their cooking and washing,
made their jokes and sang their songs. There
they sweated under their burdens, and slept, and
fell in to die. There they marched up the burn-
ing hill, where the sand devils flung by the
shells were blackening heaven, there they lay in
their dirty rags awaiting death, and there by
Gallipoli 215
thousands up and down they lie buried, in little
lonely graves where they fell, or in the pits of
the great engagements.
Those lines at Cape Helles, Anzac and
Suvla, were once busy towns, thronged by thou-
sands of citizens whose going and coming and
daily labour were cheerful with singing, as
though those places were mining camps during
a gold rush, instead of a perilous front where
the fire never ceased and the risk of death was
constant. But for the noise of war, coming
in an irregular rattle, with solitary big explo-
sions, the screams of shells or the wild whistling
crying of ricochets, they seemed busy but very
peaceful places. At night, from the sea, the
lamps of the dugouts on the cliffs were like the
lights of seacoast towns in summer, and the
places seemingly as peaceful, but for the pop
and rattle of fire and the streaks of glare from
the shells. There was always singing, some-
times very good, and always beautiful, coming
in the crash of war; and always one heard the
noises of the work of men, the beat of pile-
216 GallipoU
drivers, wheels going over stones, and the little
solid pobbing noises, from bullets dropping in
the sea.
I have said that those positions were like
mining camps during a gold rush. Ballarat,
the Sacramento, and the camps of the Transvaal
must have looked strangely like those camps at
Suvla and Cape Helles. Anzac at night was
like those crags of old building over the Arno
at Florence ; by day it was a city of cliff dwellers,
stirring memories of the race's past. An im-
mense expanse was visible from all these places ;
at Cape Helles there was the plain rising grad-
ually to Achi Baba, at Anzac a wilderness of
hills, at Suvla the same hills seen from below.
Over all these places came a strangeness of
light, unlike anything to be seen in the west, a
light which made the hills clear and unreal at
the same time, softening their savagery into
peace, till they seemed not hills but swellings of
the land, as though the land there had breathed-
in and risen a little. All the places were dust-
coloured as soon as the flowers had withered,
a dark dust-coloured where the scrub grew
Gallipoli 217
(often almost wine-dark like our own hills
where heather grows) a pale sand colour, where
the scrub gave out, and elsewhere a paleness
and a greyness as of moss and lichen and old
stone. On this sandy and dusty land, where
even the trees were grey and ghostly (olive and
Eastern currant) the camps were scattered, a
little and a little, never much in one place on
account of shelling, till the impression given was
one of multitude.
The signs of the occupation began far out at
sea where the hospital ships lay waiting for
their freight. [There were always some there,
painted white and green, lying outside the range
of the big guns. Nearer to the shore were the
wrecks of ships, some of them sunk by our men,
to make breakwaters, some sunk by the Turk
shells, some knocked to pieces or washed ashore
by foul weather. Nearly all these wrecks were
of small size, trawlers, drifters and little coast-
wise vessels such as peddle and bring home fish
on the English coasts. Closer in, right on the
beaches, were the bones of still smaller boats,
pinnaces, cutters and lighters, whose crews had
218 Galllpoli
been the men of the first landings. Men could
not see those wrecks without a thrill. There
were piers at all the beaches, all built under
shell fire, to stand both shell fire and the sea,
and at the piers there was always much busy
life, men singing at their work, horses and mules
disembarking, food and munitions and water
discharging, wounded going home and drafts
coming ashore. On the beaches were the hier-
oglyphs of the whole bloody and splendid story;
there were the marks and signs, which no one
could mistake nor see unmoved.
Even after months of our occupation the
traces were there off the main tracks. A man
had but to step from one of the roads into the
scrub, and there they lay, relics of barbed wire,
blown aside in tangles, round shrapnel-bullets
in the sand, empty cartridge-cases, clips of car-
tridge cases bent double by a blow yet undis-
charged, pieces of flattened rifle barrel, rags of
leather, broken bayonets, jags and hacks of
shell, and, in little hollows, little heaps of car-
tridge-cases, where some man had lain to fire
for hour after hour, often until he died at his
Gallipoli 219
post, on the 25th of April. Here, too, one
came upon the graves of soldiers, sometimes
alone, sometimes three or four together, each
with an inscribed cross and border of stones
from the beach. Privates, sergeants and offi-
cers lay in those graves and by them, all day
long, the work which they had made possible
by that sacrifice on the 25th, went on in a
stream, men and munitions going up to the
front, and wounded and the dying coming down,
while the explosions of the cannon trembled
through the earth to them and the bullets piped
and fell over their heads.
But the cities of those camps were not cities
of the dead, they were cities of intense life,
cities of comradeship and resolve, unlike the
cities of peace. At Mudros, all things seemed
little, for there men were dwarfed by their set-
ting; they were there in ships which made even
a full battalion seem only a cluster of heads.
On the Peninsula they seemed to have come for
the first time to full stature. There they were
bigger than their surroundings. There they
were naked manhood pitted against death in
22O Gallipoli
the desert and more than holding their own.
All those sun-smitten hills and gullies, grow-
ing nothing but crackling scrub, were peopled
by crowds. On all the roads, on the plain,
which lay white like salt in the glare, and on
the sides of the gullies, strange, sunburned,
half-naked men moved at their work with the
bronze bodies of gods. Like Egyptians build-
ing a city they passed and repassed with boxes
from the walls of stores built on the beach.
Dust had toned their uniforms even with the
land. Their half-nakedness made them more
grand than clad men. Very few of them were
less than beautiful; whole battalions were mag-
nificent, the very flower of the world's men.
They had a look in their eyes which those who
saw them will never forget.
Sometimes as one watched, one heard a noise
of cheering from the ships, and this, the herald
of good news, passed inland, till men would
rise from sleep in their dugouts, come to the
door, blinking in the sun, to pass on the cheer.
In some strange way the news, the cause of the
cheering, passed inland with the cheer; a sub-
Gallipoli 221
marine had sunk a transport off Constantinople,
or an aeroplane had bombed a powder factory.
One heard the news pass on and on, till it rang
from the front trenches ten yards from the Turk
line. Sometimes the cheering was very loud,
mingled with singing; then it was a new bat-
talion, coming from England, giving thanks
that they were there, after their months of train-
ing, to help the fleet through. Men who heard
those battalions singing will never hear those
songs of " Tipperary," " Let's all go down the
Strand," or " We'll all go the same way home,"
without a quickening at the heart.
Everywhere in the three positions there were
the homes of men. In gashes or clefts of the
earth were long lines of mules or horses with
Indian grooms. On the beaches were offices,
with typewriters clicking and telephone bells
ringing. Stacked on one side were ammuni-
tion carts so covered with bushes that they
looked like the scrub they stood on. Here and
there were strangely painted guns, and every-
where the work of men, armourer's forges, far-
rier's anvils, the noise and clink and bustle of
222 Galllpoli
a multitude. Everywhere, too, but especially
in the gullies were the cave-dwellings of the dug-
outs, which so dotted the cliffs with their doors,
that one seemed put back to Cro-Magnon or
Tampa, into some swarming tribe of cave-
dwellers. All the dugouts were different,
though all were built upon the same principle,
first a scooping in the earth, then a raised earth
ledge for a bed, then (.if one were lucky) a cor-
rugated-iron roof propped by balks, lastly a
topping of sandbags strewn with scrub. For
doors, if one had a door or sunshade, men used
sacking, burlap, a bit of canvas, or a blanket.
Then, when the work was finished, the builder
entered in, to bathe in his quarter of a pint of
water, smoke his pipe, greet his comrades, and
think foul scorn of the Turk, whose bullets
piped and droned overhead, all day and night,
like the little finches of home. Looking out
from the upper dugouts one saw the dusty,
swarming warren of men, going and coming,
with a kind of swift slouch, carrying boxes from
the beach. Mules and men passed, songs went
up and down the gullies, and were taken up by
Gall'ipoli 223
those at rest, men washed and mended clothes,
or wandered naked and sun reddened along
the beach, bathing among dropping bullets.
Wounded men came down on stretchers, sick
men babbled in pain or cursed the flies, the
forges clinked, the pile drivers beat in the balks
of the piers, the bullets droned and piped, or
rushed savagely, or popped into a sandbag.
Up in the trenches the rifles made the irregular
snaps of fire-crackers, sometimes almost ceas-
ing, then popping, then running along a section
in a rattle, then quickening down the line and
drawing the enemy, then pausing and slowly
ceasing and beginning again. From time to
time, with a whistle and a wailing, some Asian
shell came over and dropped and seemed to
multiply, and gathered to herself the shriek of
all the devils of hell, and burst like a devil and
filled a great space with blackness and dust and
falling fragments. Then another and another
came, almost in the same place, till the gunners
had had enough. Then the dust settled, the
ruin was made good, and all went on as before,
men carrying and toiling and singing, bullets
224 Gallipoli
piping, and the flies settling and swarming on
whatever was obscene in what the shell had
scattered.
Everywhere in those positions there was
gaiety and courage and devoted brotherhood,
but there was also another thing, which brooded
over all, and struck right home to the heart.
It was a tragical feeling, a taint or flavour in
the mind, such as men often feel in hospitals
when many are dying, the sense that Death was
at work there, that Death lived there, that
Death wandered up and down there and fed
on Life.
Since the main object of the campaign, to
help the fleet through the Narrows, had been
abandoned (in mid-August), and no further
thrust was to be made against the Turks, the
questions u Were our 100,000 men in Gallipoli
containing a sufficiently large army of [Turks
to justify their continuance on the Peninsula? ''
and " Could they be more profitably used else-
where? " arose in the minds of the High Direc-
tion from week to week as the war changed.
V
Gal lip oli 22$
In the early autumn, when the Central Powers
combined with Bulgaria to crush Serbia and
open a road to Constantinople, these questions
became acute. During October owing to the
radical change in the Balkan situation which
was produced by the treachery of Bulgaria and
the bewildering indecision of Greece the ad-
vantage of our continuing the campaign be-
came more and more doubtful and in Novem-
ber, after full consideration, it was decided to
evacuate the Peninsula. Preparations were
made and the work begun.
Late in November, something happened
which had perhaps some influence in hurrying
on the date of the evacuation. This was the
blizzard of the 26th-28th, which lost us about
a tenth of our whole army from cold, frostbite,
exposure, and the sicknesses which follow them.
t The 26th began as a cold, dour Gallipoli day
with a bitter northeasterly wind, which in-
creased in the afternoon to a fresh gale, with
sleet. Later, it increased still more, and blew
hard, with thunder; and with the thunder came
a rain more violent than any man of our army
226 Gallipoli
had ever seen. Water pours off very quickly
from that land of abrupt slopes. In a few
minutes every gully was a raging torrent, and
every trench a river. By an ill-chance this
storm fell with cruel violence upon the ever
famous 29th Division then holding trenches at
Suvla. The water poured down into their
trenches, as though it were a tidal wave. It
came in with a rush, with a head upon it like
the tide advancing, so quickly that men were one
minute dry and the next moment drowned at
their posts. They were caught so suddenly that
those who escaped had to leap from their
trenches for dear life, leaving coats, haver-
sacks, food and sometimes even their rifles, be-
hind them.
Our trenches were in nearly every case be-
low those of the Turks, who therefore suffered
from the water far less than our men did.
The Turks saw our men leaping from their
trenches, and either guessing the reason or fear-
ing an attack, opened a very heavy rifle and
shrapnel fire upon them. Our men had to
shelter behind the parados of their trenches,
Gallipoli 227
where they scraped themselves shallow pans in
the mud under a heavy fire. At dark the sleet
increased, the mud froze, and there our men
lay, most of them without overcoats, and many
of them without food. In one trench when
the flood rose, a pony, a mule, a pig, and two
dead Turks were washed over a barricade
together.
Before the night fell, many of our men were
frost-bitten and started limping to the ambu-
lances, under continual shrapnel fire and in
blinding sleet. A good many fell down by the
way and were frozen to death. jThe gale in-
creased slowly all through the night, blowing
hard and steadily from the north, making a
great sea upon the coast, and driving the spray
far inland. At dawn it grew colder, and the
sleet hardened into snow, with an ever-increas-
ing wind, which struck through our men to the
marrow. " They fell ill," said one who was
there, " in heaps." The water from the flood
had fallen in the night, but it was still four
feet deep in many of the trenches, and our men
passed the morning under fire in their shelter
228 Gallipoli
pans, fishing for food and rifles in their drowned
lines. All through the day the wind gathered,
till it was blowing a full gale, vicious and bitter
cold ; and on the 28th it reached its worst. The
28th was spoken of afterwards as " Frozen
Foot Day;" it was a day more terrible than
any battle; but now it was taking toll of the
Turks, and the fire slackened. Probably either
side could have had the other's position for the
taking on the 28th, had there been enough un-
frosted feet to advance. It was a day so blind
with snow and driving storm that neither side
could see to fire, and this brought the advan-
tage, that our men hopping to the ambulances
had not to go through a pelt of shrapnel bul-
lets. On the 29th, the limits of human strength
were reached. Some of those frozen three
days before were able to return to duty, and
" a great number of officers and men who had
done their best to stick it out were forced to go
to hospital." The water fell during this day,
but it left on an average 2^2 feet of thick,
slushy mud, into which many trenches collapsed.
After this the weather was fine and warm.
Gallipoli 229
At Helles and Anzac the fall of the ground
gave some protection from this gale, but at
Suvla there was none. When the weather
cleared, the beaches were heaped with the
wreck of piers, piles, boats and lighters, all
broken and jammed together. But great as
this wreck was the wreck of men was even
greater. The 29th Division had lost two-
thirds of its strength. In the three sectors
over 200 men were dead, over 10,000 were
unfit for further service and not less than
30,000 others were sickened and made old by
it.
The Turk loss was much more serious even
than this, for though they suffered less from
the wet, they suffered more from the cold,
through being on the higher ground. The
snow lay upon their trenches long after it had
gone from ours, and the Turk equipment though
very good as far as it went, was only good for
the summer. Their men wore thin clothes,
and many of them had neither overcoat nor
blanket. The blizzard which was a discourage-
ment to us, took nearly all the heart out of the
230 Galli poll
Turks; and this fact must be borne in mind in
the reading of the next few pages.
The gale had one good effect. Either the
cold or the rain destroyed or removed the cause
of the dysentery, which had taken nearly a
thousand victims a day for some months. The
disease stopped at once and no more fresh
cases were reported.
This storm made any attempt to land or to
leave the land impossible for four days to-
gether. Coming, as it did, upon the decision
to evacuate, it gave the prompting, that the
evacuation should be hurried, lest such weather
should prevent it. On the 8th of December,
the evacuation of Anzac and Suvla was ordered
to begin.
It was not an easy task to remove large
numbers of men, guns and animals from posi-
tions commanded by the Turk observers and
open to every cruising aeroplane. But by ruse
and skill, and the use of the dark, favoured by
fine weather, the work was done, almost with-
out loss, and, as far as one could judge, unsus-
pected.
Gallipoli 231
German agents, eager to discredit those
whom they could not defeat, have said, " that
we bribed the Turks to let us go; " next year
perhaps they will say " that the Turks bribed
us to go;" the year after that perhaps, they
will invent something equally false and even
sillier. But putting aside the foulness and the
folly of this bribery lie, it is interesting to
enquire how it happened that the Turks did not
attack our men while they were embarking.
The Turks were very good fighters, furious
in attack and resolute in defence, but among
their qualities of mind were some which greatly
puzzled our commanders. Their minds would
sometimes work in ways very strange to
Europeans. They did, or refrained from
doing, certain things in ways for which neither
we nor our Allies could account. Some day,
long hence, when the war is over, the Turk
story of our withdrawal will be made known.
Until then, we can only guess, why it was that
the embarkation, which many had thought
would lose us half our army, was made good
from Anzac and Suvla with the loss of only
232 Gallipoli
four or five men (or less than the normal loss
of a night in the trenches). Only two explana-
tions are possible. Either (i) the Turks
knew that we were going and wanted to be rid
of us, or" (2) they did not know that we were
going and were entirely deceived by our ruses.
Had they known that we were going from
Anzac and Suvla, it is at least likely that they
would have hastened our going, partly that
they might win some booty, which they much
needed, or take a large number of prisoners,
whose appearance would have greatly cheered
the citizens of Constantinople. But nearly all
those of our army who were there, felt, both
from observation and intelligence, that the
Turks did not know that we were going. As
far as men on one side in a war can judge of
their enemies they felt that the Turks were
deceived, completely deceived, by the ruses em-
ployed by us, and that they believed that we
were being strongly reinforced for a new at-
tack. Our soldiers took great pains to make
them believe this. Looking down upon us
from their heights, the Turks saw boats leaving
Gallipoli 233
the shore apparently empty, and returning,
apparently, full of soldiers. Looking up at
them, from our position our men saw how the
sight affected them. For the twelve days dur-
ing which the evacuation was in progress at
Anzac and Suvla, the Turks were plainly to be
seen, digging everywhere to secure themselves
from the feared attack. They dug new lines,
they brought up new guns, they made ready
for us in every way. On the night of the iQth-
2Oth December, in hazy weather, at full moon,
our men left Suvla and Anzac, unmolested.
It was said by Dr. Johnson that " no man
does anything, consciously for the last time,
without a feeling of sadness." No man of all
that force passed down those trenches, the
scenes of so much misery and pain and joy and
valour and devoted brotherhood, without a
deep feeling of sadness. Even those who had
been loudest in their joy at going were sad.
Many there did not want to go ; but felt that it
was better to stay, and that then, with another
fifty thousand men, the task could be done, and
their bodies and their blood buy victory for us.
234 Gallipoli
This was the feeling even at Suvla, where the
men were shaken and sick still from the storm ;
but at Anzac, the friendly little kindly city,
which had been won at such cost in the ever-
glorious charge of the 28th, and held since with
such pain, and built with such sweat and toil
and anguish, in thirst, and weakness and bodily
suffering, which had seen the thousands of the
I3th Division land in the dark and hide, and
had seen them fall in with the others to go to
Chunuk, and had known all the hope and fer-
vour, all the glorious resolve, and all the bitter-
ness and disappointment of the unhelped at-
tempt, the feeling was far deeper. Officers and
men went up and down the well-known gullies
moved almost to tears by the thought that the
next day those narrow acres so hardly won and
all those graves of our people so long defended
would be in Turk hands.
For some weeks, our men had accustomed
the Turks to sudden cessations of fire for half-
an-hour or more. At first, the Turks had been
made suspicious by these silences, but they were
now used to them, and perhaps glad of them.
Gallipoli 235
They were not made suspicious by the slacken-
ing of the fire on the night of the withdrawal.
The mules and guns had all gone from Suvla.
A few mules and a few destroyed guns were left
at Anzac; in both places a pile of stores was
left, all soaked in oil and ready for firing. The
ships of war drew near to the coast, and trained
their guns on the hills. In the haze of the
full moon the men filed off from the trenches
down to the beaches and passed away from
Gallipoli, from the unhelped attempt which
they had given their bodies and their blood to
make. They had lost no honour. They were
not to blame, that they were creeping off in
the dark, like thieves in the night. Had others
(not of their profession) many hundreds of
miles away, but seen as they, as generous, as
wise, as forseeing, as full of sacrifice, those
thinned companies with the looks of pain in
their faces, and the mud of the hills thick upon
their bodies, would have given thanks in Santa
Sophia three months before. They had failed
to take Gallipoli, and the mine fields still
barred the Hellespont, but they had fought a
236 GaUipoli
battle such as has never been seen upon this
earth. What they had done will become a
glory forever, wherever the deeds of heroic
unhelped men are honoured and pitied and
understood. They went up at the call of duty,
with a bright banner of a battle-cry, against an
impregnable fort. Without guns, without
munitions, without help and without drink they
climbed the scarp and held it by their own
glorious manhood, quickened by a word from
their chief. Now they were giving back the
scarp and going out into new adventures, wher-
ever the war might turn.
Those going down to the beaches wondered
in a kind of awe whether the Turks would dis-
cover them and attack. The minutes passed,
and boat after boat left the shore, but no attack
came. The arranged rifles fired mechanically
in the outer trenches at long intervals, and the
crackle of the Turk reply followed. At Anzac,
a rearguard of honour had been formed. The
last two hundred men to leave Anzac were sur-
vivors of those who had landed in the first
charge, so glorious and so full of hope on the
Gallipoli 237
25th of April. They had fought through the
whole campaign from the very beginning; they
had seen it all. It was only just that they
should be the last to leave. As they, too,
moved down, one of their number saw a soli-
tary Turk, black against the sky, hard at work
upon his trench. That was the last enemy to
be seen from Anzac.
At half-past five in the winter morning of the
2Oth December the last boat pushed off; and
the last of our men had gone from Suvla and
Anzac. Those who had been there from the
first were deeply touched. There was a long-
ing that it might be to do again, with the same
comrades, under the same chiefs but with better
luck and better backing. Some distance from
the shore the boats paused to watch the last
act in the withdrawal. It was dead calm
weather, with just that ruffle of wind which
comes before the morning. The Turk fire
crackled along the lines as usual, but the with-
drawal was still not suspected. Then from the
beaches within the stacks of abandoned stores
came the noise of explosion, the charges had
238 GaUlpoli
been fired, and soon immense flames were lick-
ing up those boxes and reddening the hills. As
the flames grew, there came a stir in the Turk
lines, and then every Turk gun that could be
brought to bear opened with shrapnel and high
explosive on the area of the bonfires. It was
plain that the Turks misread the signs. They
thought that some lucky shell had fired our
stores and that they could stop us from putting
out the flames. Helped by the blasts of many
shells the burning rose like balefire, crowned by
wreaths and streaks and spouts of flame. The
stores were either ashes, or in a blaze which
none could quench before the Turks guessed
the meaning of that burning. Long before the
fires had died and before the Turks were
wandering in joy among our trenches, our men
were aboard their ships standing over to
Mudros.
Some have said, " Even if the Turks were
deceived at Anzac and Suvla, they must have
known that you were leaving Cape Helles.
Why did they not attack you while you were
embarking there? " I do not know the answer
Galtipoli 239
to this question. But it is possible that they
did not know that we were leaving. It is pos-
sible that they believed that we should hold
Cape Helles like an Eastern Gibraltar. It is
possible, on the other hand, that they were de-
ceived again by our ruses. It is however,
certain that they watched us far more narrowly
at Cape Helles after the Anzac evacuation.
Aeroplanes cruised over our position fre-
quently, and shell-fire increased and became
very heavy. Still, when the time came, the
burning of our stores, after our men had em-
barked, seemed to be the first warning that the
Turks had that we were going.
This was a mystery to our soldiers at the
time and seems strange now. It is possible that
at Cape Helles, the Turks' shaken, frozen and
out-of-heart soldiers may have known that we
were going yet had no life left in them for an
attack. Many things are possible in this
world, and the darkness is strange and the
heart of a fellow-man is darkness to us. There
were things in the Turk heart very dark indeed
to those who tried to read it. The storm had
240 Gallipoli
dealt with them cruelly, that is all that we know.
Let us wait till we know their story.
The Cape Helles position was held for
twenty days, after we had left Anzac and Suvla.
On the Sth-pth of January in the present year,
it was abandoned, with slight loss, though in
breaking weather. By 4 o'clock on the morn-
ing of the pth of January, the last man had
passed the graves of those who had won the
beaches. They climbed on board their boats
and pushed off. [They had said good-bye to
the English dead, whose blood had given them
those acres, now being given back. Some felt,
as they passed those graves, that the stones
were living men, who cast a long look after
them when they had passed, and sighed, and
turned landward as they had turned of old.
Then in a rising sea, whipped with spray,
among the noise of ships weltering to the rails,
the battalions left Cape Helles; the River Clyde
dimmed into the gale and became a memory,
and the Gallipoli campaign was over.
Many people have asked me, what the cam-
f
Gallipoli 241
paign achieved? It achieved much. It de-
stroyed and put out of action many more of
the enemy than of our own men. Our own
losses in killed, wounded and missing were,
roughly speaking, one hundred and fifteen
thousand men, and the sick about one hundred
thousand more, or (in all) more than two and
one-half times as many as the army which made
the landing. The Turk losses from all causes
were far greater; they had men to waste and
wasted them, like water, at Cape Helles, Lone
Pine and Chunuk. The real Turk losses will
never be tabled and published, but at the five
battles of [The Landings, the 6th May, the 4th
June, the 28th of June, and the 6th-ioth Au-
gust, they lost in counted killed alone, very
nearly as many as were killed on our side in the
whole campaign. Then, though we did not do
what we hoped to do, our presence in Gallipoli
contained large armies of Turks in and near the
Peninsula. They had always from 15 to 20,-
ooo more men than we had, on the Peninsula
itself, and at least as many more, ready to
move, on the Asian shore and at Rodosto. In
242 Gallipoli
all, we disabled, or held from action elsewhere,
not less than 400,000 Turks, that is, a very
large army of men who might have been used
elsewhere, with disastrous advantage, in the
Caucasus, when Russia was hard pressed, or,
as they were used later, in Mesopotamia.
So much for the soldiers 1 side ; but politically,
the campaign achieved much. In the begin-
ning, it had a profound effect upon Italy; it
was, perhaps, one of the causes which brought
Italy into her war with Austria. In the begin-
ning, too, it had a profound effect upon the
Balkan States. Bulgaria made no move against
us until five months after our landings. Had
we not gone to Gallipoli she would have joined
our enemies in the late spring instead of in the
middle autumn.
Some of our enemies have said that " the
campaign was a defeat for the British Navy."
It is true that we lost two capital ships, from
mines, in the early part of the campaign, and I
think, in all, two others, from torpedoes, dur-
ing the campaign. Such loss is not very serious
in eleven months of naval war. For the cam-
Gallipoli 243
paign was a naval war, it depended utterly and
solely upon the power of the Navy. By our
Navy we went there and were kept there, and
by our Navy we came away. During the nine
months of our hold on the Peninsula over three
hundred thousand men were brought by the
Navy from places three, four, or even six thou-
sand miles away. During the operations some
half of these were removed by our Navy, as
sick and wounded, to ports from eight hundred
to three thousand miles away. Every day, for
eleven months, ships of our Navy moved up
and down the Gallipoli coast bombarding the
Turk positions. Every day during the opera-
tions our Navy kept our armies in food, drink
and supplies. Every day, in all that time, if
weather permitted, ships of our Navy cruised
in the Narrows and off Constantinople, and the
seaplanes of our Navy raided and scouted
within the Turk lines. If there had been, I
will not say, any defeat of, but any check to
the Navy, we could not have begun the cam-
paign or continued it. Every moment of those
eleven months of war was an illustration of
244 Gallipoli
the silent and unceasing victory of our Navy's
power. As Sir Ian Hamilton has put it " the
Navy was our father and our mother."
" Still," our enemies say, " you did not win
the Peninsula." We did not; and some day,
when truth will walk clear-eyed, it will be known
why we did not. Until then, let our enemies
say this: "They did not win, but they came
across three thousand miles of sea, a little army
without reserves and short of munitions, a
band of brothers, not half of them half-trained,
and nearly all of them new to war. They
came to what we said was an impregnable fort
on which our veterans of war and massacre had
laboured for two months, and by sheer naked
manhood they beat us, and drove us out of it.
Then rallying, but without reserves, they beat
us again and drove us further. Then rallying
once more, but still without reserves, they beat
us again, this time to our knees. Then, had
they had reserves, they would have conquered,
but by God's pity they had none. t Then, after
a lapse of time, when we were men again, they
had reserves, and they hit us a staggering blow,
Gallipoli 245
which needed but a push to end us, but God
again had pity. After that our God was in-
deed pitiful, for England made no further
thrust, and they went away."
Even so was wisdom proven blind,
So courage failed, so strength was chained,
Even so the gods, whose seeing mind
Is not as ours, ordained.
Lollingdon,
June 29, 1916.
THE END
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
T
HE following pages contain advertisements of
a few Macmillan books by the same author
D
568
.3
M37
1916B
C.I
ROBA
