Blood and Thunder (20 page)

Charles managed to disguise his injury well until his trousers became soaked in blood. He was deposited on a stretcher, carried down to the beach and sent off to Malta. His company remained in the firing line without him. He likened his battle experience to foreplay. ‘I should like to get back quick, because I have seen just enough to tantalise.' It hadn't been glorious, but as far as he was concerned they were not to blame. If the commanding officer had not instructed them to retire then Charles thought that they could have been cut off and annihilated. ‘That day they showed great steadiness for raw troops, but their situation was impossible.'

The New Zealand Brigade had been moved round to Cape Helles to take part in the assault too. The dead lay everywhere. The wounded cried for water in between the trenches. Aubrey Herbert had seen enough. He located medical officers and had them approach General Birdwood about some sort of ceasefire to attend to the situation. The general did not think that the Germans would allow the Turks to carry through such an idea. Aubrey was disgusted. He had been out with a megaphone, which Birdwood quite rightly thought was a futile exercise, trying to convince the Turks to surrender. He was shot at, laughed at and otherwise ignored. He had the same effect as a trench mortar. Every time he stopped to speak he elicited a volley of rifle fire. Unperturbed, Aubrey continued with his ploy to effect a temporary ceasefire to take care of the dead and wounded.

Patrick was one of the few sub-lieutenants who came through unscathed but his love affair with the war was already over. Men around him had been struck and a bullet had lodged in his Asprey steel mirror, which he thought almost as good an advert for the manufacturer as Oc Asquith's wound had been for the government. The war was a thing that he didn't think a man ought to miss, but now he had seen it and participated in battle he began to wonder if this was any place for a civilised man.

On 8 May the New Zealanders made their own attempt on Krithia and gained about 400 yards before they were pinned down. Despite this, the battle's commander, Aylmer Hunter-Weston, ordered them to attack again that evening in pursuit of Achi Baba. The effort failed amidst catastrophic casualty figures for Ian Hamilton's force.

The smell of bodies had now become unbearable in the stifling heat. Aubrey tried again but was refused permission to try to negotiate a truce. Aubrey was relentless, demanding to board Hamilton's ship to speak to the MEF's commander himself. He had no love for Hamilton at the best of times but this was to enhance his distaste. Aubrey labelled him a vain fool and the dislike was mutual. The general, though, did approve a pause in hostilities for burials, providing that it did not appear that the British had asked for it. Aubrey managed to make both sides believe that it was the other who had wanted a ceasefire. A colleague and an Oxford friend remarked that ‘Liman von Sanders says we did, Sir Ian Hamilton says they did. My own opinion is that Aubrey Herbert was responsible for it.'

On 24 May Aubrey's stomach was in knots, paranoid that something was going to go wrong. He climbed upwards to 400 Plateau above the beach at Anzac Cove through a field of poppies. He had just reached another plateau full of tall corn when the ‘fearful smell of death' hit him. Corpses were scattered all over the place. He climbed through gullies of thyme and it was ‘indescribable'. A Turkish Red Crescent man gave him a dressing doused in antiseptic to cloak his mouth and nose from the smell. As the soldiers went about their burial work, they were visibly distressed. Aubrey came across two wounded men ‘in all that multitude of silence, crying in the gullies'. He approached one, who lay in the middle of a pile of bodies, pulled out a water bottle and helped him to drink from it. A Turkish captain with him was feeling reflective. ‘At this spectacle,' he said, ‘even the most gentle must feel savage and the most savage must weep.'

Amongst the bodies the damage done by machine guns was evident by the injuries that the men had sustained: ‘their heads doubled under them with the impetus of the rush and both hands clasping their bayonets'. Aubrey was required to alleviate a fair amount of bickering throughout the day. The Turks argued that the Australians were making off with rifles and the Australians levelled their own charges at the enemy while Aubrey tried to pacify both sides. Craftiness did occur. One chaplain managed to get a trench that had been the source of much bother used as a grave so that it was taken out of use and both sides spied when they could.

Aubrey, being Aubrey, managed to make friends with some of the Turkish troops. The sultan's men were gleaned from all over the Ottoman Empire. He had a Greek try to surrender to him, an Anatolian gave him a fierce stare to send chills up a man's spine and the Albanians took to him immediately. They knew Aubrey by name, for after all he had nearly become their king and men began clapping him on the back and cheering. Unfortunately this was in the midst of funeral services occurring across the battlefield and Aubrey quietened them all down quickly. The truce was due to end in the late afternoon and Aubrey joked with the enemy troops that they would shoot at him the next day. The Albanians found the idea ridiculous. That night Aubrey was dousing his throat with whiskey to get rid of the taste of death and coating his legs with iodine where barbed wire had slashed at his skin.

The following day HMS
Triumph
was sunk in full view of the beach. ‘There was fury, impotence and rage on the beach and on the hill.' Aubrey heard a captain ranting, ‘you should kill all enemies, not give them cigarettes!!!!' Men were crying and cursing. ‘Very different from last night when they were all wishing each other luck.'

On 4 June the British and French launched another massed attack on Achi Baba. The 3rd Battle of Krithia was the final attempt to carry out the original plan of attack on the peninsula. At 8 a.m. a bombardment began, concentrating on strongpoints before it became a general barrage on all the Turkish lines three hours later. The French to the right of the Hood were also pummelling the Turkish lines but unfortunately for the allies, the wind blew the smoke from their shells right back into their faces and obscured their view at midday when the Hood burst forward.

As soon as they emerged men began to fall back dead into the trench in a hail of Turkish fire. Those that survived poured into three enemy trenches taking an obscene amount of casualties. They were in dire need of support. To their right, the French were completely mown down by machine guns and the Royal Naval Division was therefore exposed to enfilading fire. Setting off behind the Hood, the Collingwood Battalion fell in their droves before they could even get to the front line. Butchered and in a state of confusion, at lunchtime they were ordered to retreat. As if this was not crushing enough, the following day the Turks launched a forceful counter-attack. The whole offensive ground to a halt and all hopes of an advance evaporated.

Patrick went into battle having just received word that Julian Grenfell and Edward Horner had fallen foul of the Germans and ended up in the same hospital in Boulogne. He had been abruptly pulled out of the line at the very last moment to replace a fallen French interpreter dealing with the troops next door. There was simply no time to think of his friends when the Hood was being slaughtered all around him. The battalion suffered severely on 4 June. Of fifteen officers, six were killed and five wounded, including Cleg Kelly. Patrick was one of only four to come out physically unscathed. He was ‘filled with disgust and rage' at the folly of it. Trenches were captured but they got nowhere near the summit of the hill. The Hood had lost twenty-six of thirty officers since 6 May and finally attempts to carry out the initial intentions on the peninsula were abandoned. It all appeared to have been for nothing.

Charles Lister was fit to re-join the Royal Naval Division a few days later. His return was mortifying. He sailed in at dawn and the fleet was nowhere to be seen. Just a couple of hospital ships bobbed about with a destroyer or two. The green keel of the sunken
Majestic
stuck out above the waterline lit by a single lamp, reminding Charles of the oil lamps put on the graves at San Lorenzo cemetery in Rome on All Soul's night. He found the Hood much changed. The survivors were working on the beach, grossly under-officered and digging saps, sniping, lugging supplies and even carrying out guard duty for high-ranking officers. As on the Western Front, stagnant warfare now kicked in on the Gallipoli Peninsula.

Aubrey's mood was desolate. He found the inactivity and the calm awful. The likes of his own general, Godley, were not unpopular, but Hamilton was another story. Aubrey despised him. He reported that he had been to the area precisely twice in the early stages of their occupation. ‘I think for a quarter of an hour each time and has never been around the positions at all. GHQ are loathed.' Aubrey grew more and more bitter towards him. In June he wrote to his wife that Hamilton had ‘the obstinacy of weak men'. He continued his appraisal: ‘I have had one or two instances when I have seen how he and his staff believe what they want to believe in the face of all sense and evidence.'

Neither did Aubrey reserve his venom for General Hamilton. Although an MP himself, he did not refrain from criticising the politicians at home for the ineptitude that he believed was responsible for the army's plight. Thanks to his wife he had intimate knowledge of what was being said inside 10 Downing Street and was distinctly unimpressed at how miserable Churchill was at his failure. Apparently he had said that if he was Prime Minister for twenty years then it would not make up for the failure of the Dardanelles. ‘I would like him to die in some of the torments I have seen so many die in here,' Aubrey spat. ‘But his only “agony” you say is missing PM.'

Despite the failure of the expedition thus far, Kitchener, in the face of a disastrous scenario in Flanders, was not about to let the campaign fold. During the summer the beaches on the peninsula were swarming with activity. Sitting in a rest camp with the rest of the Hood, Charles Lister claimed to be quite enjoying himself. ‘I look forward to the rum nights with all the zeal of an old sea dog,' he reported. He had a light-hearted approach to war but it did not sit well with everybody. Certain occupants took life on the beaches very seriously but he couldn't. He likened one of them to Blackpool but then noted that ‘its inhabitants take the shells rather seriously and would resent this flippancy'.

There were opportunities for swimming, which Charles loved, although one had to become adept at dodging the bloated corpses of dead horses. Animals of the living variety differed greatly from the tabby cats of the Western Front. Patrick Shaw-Stewart was repulsed by ‘centipedes and other monsters'. Flies were by far the worst irritation. It was impossible to sleep during the day without some sort of protection and Patrick had frantically employed his whole family on thinking up ideas to defeat them. ‘Fly papers, fly whisks, some sulphuric apparatus for smoking them out' anything that they could think of. ‘Flies by day and flies by night, flies in the water, flies in the food,' bemoaned one Etonian.

OEs relied on care packages from home as, unlike the Western Front, it was impossible to pop into the nearest town for supplies. The alien climate also disturbed the men's health. One OE in the Royal Engineers was lucky to have a stash of chlorodyne with him which he began getting his mother to supplement. With it he had managed to cure most of the diarrhoea/dysentery that struck down his sappers. He was also maintaining a stash of arrowroot for similar purposes. ‘I have to harden my heart and be really brutal,' he wrote, ‘as I think every man in the section has been upset by the heat and unsuitable food at one time or another and any who have a little gut just lie down and collapse.'

Patrick was tired of the squalid existence that he claimed reminded him of the Selli tribe in the
Iliad
who crouched on the ground and never washed their feet. He had let his red beard grow through and according to Charles he looked like a holy man who had dyed it with henna. The situation was not, of course, helped by the many dead bodies lying about decomposing. Patrick had a pile of them in front of his trench. ‘At dawn a lark got up from there and started singing. A queer contrast. Rupert Brooke could have written a poem on that, rather his subject.'

By mid July the Hood was in the trenches; old Turkish lines. ‘It is fairly whiffy,' Charles Lister wrote; on account of the bodies that were close by. ‘With the tell-tale stocking or end of boot' sticking ominously out of the trench walls. They were at risk of snipers during the day and at night when the men were led up and down the communication trenches they tripped over the bodies of unlucky colleagues who had exposed themselves. ‘It is an awful job getting our men past them,' Charles explained. ‘They have a sort of supernatural fear of trampling on their own dead.'

The lines themselves were cramped and Charles complained that he had had his toes trodden on ‘by every officer and man of a Scotch territorial division' who came past in driblets, lost and wandering. Patrick managed, even when the trench was ‘a seething mass of humanity', to remain lucid, but Charles lost his temper and ultimately began jumping up and down on the parapet ‘kicking dust on their heads and … using the most violent language'.

On 1 August he wrote home once again from a sickbed to say that, having been told that they would be taken off the peninsula at the end of the month, suddenly not a man was allowed to leave. ‘So I suppose there will be something doing.' And indeed there was. The British government had approved the sending of tens of thousands of reinforcements to Gallipoli; New Army and Territorial men; basically whatever they had to hand. This massive influx opened up all kinds of possibilities for Ian Hamilton.

Cape Helles, already the scene of so much devastation, was a write-off. Anzac Cove still looked like the better option but it was now that Suvla Bay to the north, previously ignored, came into play. It had been deemed too far away from the original objectives in April, but now fresh (but inexperienced) troops were ordered to assault it on 6 August under dubiously defined and overcomplicated orders. Men, unready for battle, were thrown into an overly optimistic attack which failed to recognise just how much trouble the Turkish resistance had caused. Not surprisingly they failed.