Castles of Steel (94 page)

That afternoon, March 13, Hamilton left Charing Cross station on a special train, seen off by his friends Winston and Clementine Churchill, but not by Kitchener, who declared that he was too busy. The new commander was accompanied by a small staff of officers yanked the day before from behind their London desks. In their briefcases, they carried all the information the War Office could supply: an out-of-date map, a prewar Admiralty report on the Dardanelles defenses, an old handbook on the Ottoman army, and two tourist guidebooks to western Turkey. Whisked to France on a destroyer, then hurried south in another special train, they embarked in Marseilles on the new 30-knot light cruiser
Phaeton.
Along the way, Hamilton mused on his situation in his diary: “Only two sorts of Commanders-in-Chief could possibly find time to scribble like this on their way to take up an enterprise in many ways unprecedented—a German and a Britisher. The German because every possible contingency would have been worked out for him beforehand; the Britisher because he has nothing—literally nothing—in his portfolio except a blank check signed with those grand yet simple words ‘John Bull.’ ”

Once
Phaeton
reached the Aegean, Hamilton, who had been born in Corfu, relished the “thyme-scented breezes . . . the crimson in the eastern sky . . . the waves of liquid opal . . . the exquisite, exquisite air . . . the sea like an undulating carpet of blue velvet outspread for Aphrodite.” Reality intruded when, “at noon, passed a cruiser taking Admiral Carden invalided back to Malta.”

Ian Hamilton was an exemplary British soldier of the old Victorian army, a small, professional force whose gentlemen officers lived in a clubbish, colonial world, undergirded by the plucky courage of common British soldiers. Hamilton, a delicate and romantic Scot, was a man of feverish energy. He had charm and a quick smile, he knew classical and English literature, he wrote witty letters, and he had a circle of important friends reaching far beyond the army. Most of his life, however, had been spent on the imperial frontiers in India, the Sudan, and South Africa; by 1914, he was said to have seen more active service than any other senior officer in the British army.

[When Hamilton encountered Roger Keyes off the Dardanelles, it was a family reunion of sorts. Hamilton’s first overseas assignment, in 1873 when he was a twenty-year-old army subaltern, was to an Indian army unit commanded by Keyes’s father, General Sir Charles Keyes. Roger Keyes’s mother, wrote Hamilton, “of whom . . . [Roger] is an ugly likeness, was as high-spirited, fascinating, clever a creature as I ever saw. Camel-riding, hawking, dancing . . . she was the idol of the Punjab Frontier Force. His father . . . whose loss of several fingers from a sword cut earned him my special boyhood veneration, was really a devil of a fellow. . . . Riding together in the early morning . . . we suddenly barged into a mob of wild Waziri tribesmen who jumped out of the ditch and held us up—hand on bridle. The old general spoke Pushtu fluently and there was a parley between them. . . . Where were they going? To buy camels at Dera Ghazi Khan. How far had they come? Three days march, but they had no money. The general simulated amazement. ‘You have come all that distance to buy camels without money? These are strange tales you tell me. I fear that when you pass through Dera Ismail you will have to . . . [sell] your nice pistols and knives. Oh yes, I see them quite well; they are peeping at me from under your
poshteens
[cloaks].’ The Waziris laughed and took their hands off our reins. Instantly, the general shouted to me, ‘Come on—gallop!’ And in less than no time we were going hell for leather along the lonely frontier road. . . . ‘That was a narrow squeak,’ said the general, ‘but you may take liberties with a Waziri if only you can make him laugh.’ ”]

He had often been wounded, his left hand was paralyzed, and three times he had been recommended for the Victoria Cross. Hamilton’s flaw as a commander was that, in the colonial wars that had taught him his trade, he had learned to rely on the competence of fellow British officers; they, being on the spot, were often better qualified to make decisions than the commander. He preferred to urge rather than to command and his inclination, even when things appeared to be going badly, was not to intervene. Now, in this new kind of warfare where the stakes were higher, the absence of ruthlessness in this military leader was to hurt him and his men. Nevertheless, at sixty-two, Ian Hamilton had been summoned by his old chief, the man whom he privately referred to in his diaries as Old K. He had been given an army and ordered to conduct the largest amphibious operation in the history of the world. If he succeeded, Old K. had said, he would win the war.

Gallipoli is a peninsula of rugged and desolate land thrusting fifty-two miles into the Aegean Sea. At its neck, the peninsula is connected to the European continent by the Bulair isthmus, three miles across. To the southwest, the peninsula broadens to twelve miles; then, continuing southwest, it tapers to a rounded tip at Cape Helles. Viewed from the sea, Gallipoli is sternly beautiful, corrugated with green and brown ridges rising to a thousand feet. To the walker or climber, the ground is rough, broken, indented with gullies, escarpments, and narrow, irregular valleys, lifting to a craggy spine of steep ridges. Six miles north of Cape Helles, the sloping hill of Achi Baba stands 590 feet above the lower peninsula; in the center of the peninsula, the crest of Chunuk Bair rises 850 feet; nearby, Sari Bair ridge, the highest point on Gallipoli, is just short of a thousand feet. The shores of the peninsula are edged by sandstone cliffs, broken here and there by ravines washed out by torrential autumn and winter rains. At the mouths of some of these gullies, narrow strips of sandy or stony beach lie along the sea. For a few weeks in April and May, Gallipoli is covered with red poppies, purple lupine, large white daisies, and other flowers. Heather and wild thyme grow everywhere along with scrub: low shrubs, thick brushwood, and small clumps of stunted pine. The soil is sandy, blowing in dry weather, sticky when wet, and generally inhospitable to agriculture, although in the small villages there are fruit trees, small olive orchards, and a few vineyards. In 1914, the roads were primitive and travelers passing from one point on the peninsula to another preferred to go by boat.

This is the ground where an Allied army was to land and a Turkish army to defend in a campaign that, perhaps more than any other in the Great War, still is vividly recalled to memory by its name alone: Gallipoli.

Carden’s destruction of the outer forts and de Robeck’s assault on the Narrows had given warning. On March 24, Enver Pasha, the Turkish minister of war, had summoned Otto Liman von Sanders, the head of the German military mission, to his office and asked him to assume command of the Turkish army at the Dardanelles. Sanders, a tall, stern Prussian cavalry general, quick to make decisions, scanty with praise, and sharp in reprimand, had been sent to Turkey by the kaiser himself and viewed his position as one of extraordinary consequence. Invited to dinner at the American embassy, the general, his uniformed chest sparkling with medals, was seated next to the ambassador’s daughter, to whom he boorishly refused to speak. Afterward, he bitterly complained that the personal representative of the German emperor belonged at the head of the table, not alongside an insignificant young woman. The Austrian ambassador, who had advised his American colleague on the seating arrangements, pointed out that Wagenheim was the German ambassador and that “it is not customary for an emperor to have two representatives at the same court.” Sanders persisted, making himself so unpopular that all other foreign ambassadors announced that if he were ever given the kind of precedence he demanded at any function they attended, they would walk out in a body.

Despite his social pretensions, Sanders was an experienced, professional soldier and Enver had made an excellent choice. Sanders accepted the request and immediately set off for the Gallipoli peninsula, where he found himself in command of 80,000 conscript soldiers. Most were Anatolian peasants so ill clad that they passed the same vermin-infested uniforms from unit to unit in order that, on inspection, the German general would find the men before him completely dressed. Sanders noticed, however, that he often saw “shoes” made of cloth tied around the foot with a piece of string; at other times, the men simply appeared barefoot. These troops were “scattered like frontier guards” along 150 miles of seacoast on both sides of the Dardanelles; thus, an enemy on landing “would have found resistance everywhere, but no forces or reserves to make a strong and effective counterattack.” Sanders corrected this deployment, pulling two divisions away from the coast and stationing them in the middle of the peninsula where they could respond to threats from several directions. He began building roads and bridges to expedite their movements. He found that the peninsula’s potential landing beaches had only rudimentary fortification and he set thousands of men to digging more trenches, setting up more gun emplacements, and stringing more barbed wire, some of it out into the water in front of the beaches. Chosen men were given special training in handling machine guns and hand grenades and in sniping. “If the English will only leave me alone for eight days,” he said on March 27. Later, he was to write: “The British allowed us four good weeks.”

Hamilton defined his own instructions in their simplest form: “I have no roving commission to conquer Asia Minor. I have not come here for any other purpose whatsoever but to help the fleet through the Dardanelles. The War Office think the Gallipoli peninsula occupation is the best way to ef-fect this purpose. So do the Admiralty and so does the admiral in executive command.” To occupy Gallipoli, Hamilton now commanded 75,000 men: Englishmen, Scots, Irishmen, Australians, New Zealanders, Gurkhas, Sikhs, French Foreign Legionnaires, Senegalese, and Zouaves. These troops were scattered around the eastern Mediterranean. Some were already at Mudros, some were in Egypt, some were still in North Africa. The 29th Division was on the high seas aboard twenty-two troopships and would not arrive until the first week of April. Then, when the transports did begin to arrive, it was discovered that the ships had been loaded so rapidly and haphazardly that it was impossible to know which ones contained what equipment; wagons were in one ship, horses in another, harnesses in a third; the same chaos applied to artillery, ammunition, machine guns, tents, and supplies of food. “The slipshod manner in which the troops have been sent out from England is something awful,” said Wemyss. The 29th Division, Hamilton decided, would have to be disembarked and the ships unloaded, sorted out, and repacked. This could not be done at Mudros, where there were neither docks nor cranes nor laborers. It was this situation that led Hamilton to tell de Robeck that he needed three weeks to reorganize his army in Egypt.

Hamilton’s new base was at Alexandria, where his staff moved first into a large old house that had once been a brothel and had neither electricity nor running water; after dark, the staff worked by candlelight. A few days later, the army leased the Hotel Metropole for its offices. Practical information about Gallipoli was scanty. No one knew the depth of water off the beaches, the location or condition of the roads, or whether the peninsula contained any wells or fresh water springs. (Later, they were to discover that numerous springs, bubbling with fresh water, were on the ridges, where they kept the Turks plentifully supplied. Water for the Allied troops on the beaches had to be brought in barges from Egypt, 700 miles away.) There were too few small boats to carry the troops ashore, so throughout the Middle East, dozens of trawlers, lighters, and caïques were purchased for cash; in one day, British officers bought forty-two large lighters and five tugs at Piraeus. Fifteen hundred donkeys were bought or rented with their keepers and drivers. As the days passed, hundreds of ships descended on Lemnos and Mudros. The island and its little town had become the forward marshaling point for a huge naval and military operation; the immense natural harbor now was filled with battleships, cruisers, destroyers, troop transports, tramp steamers, water barges, tugs, and hospital ships.

At Alexandria and Mudros, the staff examined the question of where the army should land. Kitchener had forbidden a landing on the Asian coast, and landings on the shore inside the Dardanelles were ruled out because they would come under fire from the guns of the Narrows forts and the howitzers on the Asian shore. The peninsula’s Aegean coast remained. De Robeck, trying to be helpful, suggested that Hamilton land his army at Bulair, on the peninsula’s neck, thereby cutting the road to Constantinople and isolating the Turkish army on Gallipoli. Hamilton personally reconnoitered Bulair from the bridge of a British cruiser and saw that his troops would have to come ashore into a swamp, then assault a ridge of high ground honeycombed with earthwork fortifications that 10,000 Turks had been constructing for a month. With Bulair ruled out, the possible landing sites were reduced to three: Cape Helles, on the tip of the peninsula; Ari Burny, thirteen miles up the western coast of the peninsula; and Suvla Bay, a beach about a mile north of Ari Burny. Eventually Hamilton and his officers drew up their plan: the 29th Division would land on the five small beaches at the tip of the peninsula around Cape Helles. The Anzacs would go ashore at Ari Burny and, as a temporary diversion, the 16,000 troops of the French division would land at Kum Kale on the Asian side. Hamilton’s hope was that by the evening of the first day, the 29th Division would seize the crest of Achi Baba, which dominated southern Gallipoli, and that the Anzacs would secure the heights of Sari Bair, astride the peninsula’s middle. But Hamilton’s first concern was the moment of landing itself. The troops were to be carried to Gallipoli aboard warships; a mile from the coast, the men would climb down into the ships’ boats and be towed by tugs nearer the shore; close to the beaches, the boats would cast off and be rowed the final few hundred yards. In order to put a large number of men quickly ashore, an imaginative variation was proposed: the 6,000-ton collier
River Clyde
would be packed with 2,000 men, then run up on the beach, whereupon the soldiers would disembark from holes—romantically designated sally ports—cut in the ship’s sides. “In my mind, the crux was to get my army ashore,” Hamilton later wrote. “Once ashore, I could hardly think that Great Britain and France would not in the long run defeat Turkey.”