Churchill's Wizards (10 page)

Men still inside the
River Clyde
heard nightmarish noises. They at least had food and water, which the hundreds trapped on the beach did not have. As Royal Navy big ships ventured closer to shell Seddülbahir, small boats tried to collect the wounded in the afternoon and evening. After dark, one of the staff officers on board volunteered to go ashore to assess the situation.

Lieutenant Colonel Richard ‘Dick' Doughty-Wylie was 46 years old, a nephew of the Arabian explorer Charles Doughty and the married lover of the Arabist Gertrude Bell. He had spent twenty years as an active professional soldier in Asia and Africa before his wounds pushed him towards the job of military consul in Turkey and Abyssinia. Old soldiers never die, however. In 1909, before the Great War brought enmity with Turkey, Doughty-Wylie used Turkish regular troops to prevent a massacre of Armenians at Adama. He spoke Turkish, and his knowledge of the Ottoman Empire was seen by the Egyptian command as so useful to the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force that he was taken on to Sir Ian Hamilton's staff.

Doughty-Wylie found men still alive sheltering under the bank on the beach below Seddülbahir and in the morning he was among the officers who rallied them. Collecting the remnants of three battalions, the Hampshires, the Dublins and the Munsters, he encouraged the attack that captured the Turkish fort on the left and the ruined village. Doughty-Wylie then came back to arrange for
Queen Elizabeth
's massive guns to shell the remaining Turkish redoubt on Hill 141 overlooking the beach. When the naval bombardment finished at two in the afternoon, he personally led the infantry attack on the last fort. He had lost one puttee and was carrying only a walking stick because he did not want to bear arms against his old friends the Turks. He was buried where he fell, at the summit of the hill in the moment of victory, when a sniper's bullet blew away the side of his face, killing him instantly. His entry in the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
ends: ‘Doughty-Wylie was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross. He was the highest ranking officer to win the award during the Gallipoli campaign.'

It was a cruel spring on the Peninsula. So many soldiers were killed in the first month – more than in the three years of the Boer War, says John Buchan – that the British and the Turks organised a one-day truce on 24 May to bury their dead. Aubrey Herbert came across ‘entire companies annihilated – not wounded, but killed' by machine-gun fire. The reek of dead men and mules going bad in the sun made soldiers vomit. Staff officer Compton Mackenzie jumped up on a parapet at Quinn's Post that day: ‘Looking down I saw squelching up from the ground on either side of my boot like a rotten mangold the deliquescent green and black flesh of a Turk's head.' The smell of death and putrefaction was ‘tangible … clammy as the membrane of a bat's wing', and Mackenzie said it took two weeks to get just two hours' exposure to it out of his nostrils. At night, the offshore wind carried the stench out to the ships at sea.

Now camouflage became important. From the moment they set foot on the charnel-house peninsula, Allied soldiers were under accurate rifle fire. They looked for shelter or dug it for themselves with trenching tools. Being neither camouflaged nor concealed put them at a severe disadvantage vis-à-vis their opponents, as the Australian Albert Facey says in his extraordinary autobiography,
A Fortunate
Life
, which calls his time on the peninsula ‘the worst four months of my whole life'. He found himself with other Anzacs crawling about in small groups, with NCOs having to make the plans because all the officers had been picked off:

The
War Illustrated
for 21 August 1915 has a photograph of a captured Turkish sniper between two Australian soldiers in shorts with shouldered rifles. Only his bald head is visible above the mass of leafy shrubbery that hides him. The caption reads:
The Turk, wily as are all Orientals, is quick to assimilate the ideas of his temporary masters. Sniping, which has been such a feature of the Great War in Europe, is also very much in vogue at the Dardanelles. This captive Turkish sniper seems to have found an effective disguise, but not so sufficiently as to escape the vigilance of his foes.

Aubrey Herbert heard about it:

‘Wiliness', ‘treachery': those were the names for camouflage and deception when enemy foreigners used them and we did not. Kangaroo-hunters of the Australian outback and deer-hunters from New Zealand's mountains adapted to new forms of shooting. Billy Sing of the 5th Light Horse was the best-known Australian sniper. Half Indian, very dark with a thick moustache and goatee beard, Sing specialised in snap-shooting on his spotter's commands; his record kill was nine men in one day. When there weren't enough hand grenades, men manufactured their own from dynamite in jam tins packed with rusty metal scrap and snippets of barbed wire. Opposing trenches were sometimes no more than a cricket pitch apart.

Yet these soldiers who were fighting each other tooth and nail to the death did not, on the whole, hate their enemy. They seem to have respected each other's cheerfulness and bravery amid shared squalor. Alan Moorehead compared this to the cruel friendliness of the very poor. ‘Abdul', ‘Johnny Turk' or ‘Jacko', as the Anzacs called the Turkish soldier, was a character highly regarded by soldiers like Private Henry Barnes:

Larks sang above hills dotted with blue cornflowers and scarlet poppies that only exacerbated the hay fever of A. P. Herbert, the future humorist, lawyer and parliamentarian. When he sneezed on
patrol one night in no-man's-land, he alerted a Turkish sniper who shot Herbert's fellow scout through the femoral artery. Herbert had to carry the bleeding, dying man back to his own trenches, and put the incident into
The Secret Battle
(1919) which Winston Churchill rightly described as ‘one of the most moving of the novels produced by the war … a soldier's tale cut in stone'.

Herbert shows in the book how different conditions were in the two theatres where he served, France and the Peninsula. No one ever went home on leave from Gallipoli: you left on a stretcher or sewn up in a blanket. In some French sectors, the line could be quiet for months, but on the Peninsula ‘from dawn to dawn it was genuine infantry warfare':

Through the gruesome Gallipoli campaign, Herbert's loathing of Winston Churchill grew. Waiting to invade in April he had written in his diary, ‘Winston's name fills everyone with rage. Roman emperors killed slaves to make themselves popular, he is killing free men to make himself famous.'

Three thousand miles away, in London, the dramatic resignation of ageing Admiral Jackie Fisher led to a political crisis. The Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith (reeling from the news that his mistress was marrying another member of his cabinet) was forced to form a wartime coalition government with the opposition, Bonar Law's Conservatives, who were described by Compton Mackenzie as ‘barren of policy yet greedy of place and patronage'. The Tories demanded two Liberal scalps as the price of coalition: Lord Haldane's and Winston Churchill's.

On 26 May 1915, Churchill was ousted from the Admiralty, although he kept a seat in Cabinet and on the Dardanelles Committee to try and see the enterprise through. This was a tremendous shock for him – Violet Bonham Carter believed it ‘the sharpest and the deepest wound he suffered in his whole career'. Clementine Churchill told her husband's biographer, Martin Gilbert: ‘I thought he would die of grief.' Aubrey Herbert's wife, Mary Vesey, dined at No. 10, Downing Street in June 1915, and was seated next to Winston Churchill:

Aubrey Herbert wrote back angrily from the peninsula, ‘As for Winston, I would like him to die in some of the torments I have seen so many die in here. But his only ‘agony' you say is missing being PM.'

The Tories in the government coalition blocked Churchill from going out in person to ginger up Gallipoli in July. Churchill could do nothing. The scheme was out of his hands. But the setback did give him something manual to occupy his mind – he started painting.

Churchill started with his children's paintbox one Sunday in July 1915. The next day he procured easel, canvas, oil paints, palette, brushes, and a long white dustcoat. For Churchill, painting a picture was a mixture of fighting a battle (but with ‘no evil fate' to avenge ‘the jaunty violence') and a sort of enchantment. His daughter Mary Soames said: ‘When he picked up a paint brush it was like picking up a magic wand.'

Back in the Aegean, in August 1915, another painter, Norman Wilkinson, had climbed to the foretop of HMS
Jonquil
to observe, from a safe distance, the landings of the British 9th Corps at lightly defended Suvla Bay, in the last big push of the Dardanelles campaign. He called it ‘the living cinema of battle':

Alan Moorehead's
Gallipoli
, which is a masterpiece of narrative history, includes Norman Wilkinson's painting of soldiers crossing the salt lake. Moorehead, writing forty years later, saw a new principle slowly being revealed in the Gallipoli campaign:

This was true of the flank landings at Helles in April 1915, and of the way Gurkha Bluff was taken by the British on 12 May. It was true, too, of Compton Mackenzie's deception initiative on Lesbos in July. The writer was sent in his Royal Marines uniform from GHQ to Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. His orders were to make plans for establishing a ‘secret' military base there, in readiness for a forthcoming big Allied attack on Smyrna on the Turkish mainland. No such attack was planned: the whole thing was a diversion. But Mackenzie told various people – the British Consul,
The Times
' correspondent, the Civil Governor – about the plans, ‘in confidence', and numerous Greek small businessmen soon came rushing forward with drachma bribes in the hope of future contracts with military forces. Mackenzie, of course, suavely but unconvincingly denied they were coming. This three-week deception operation, planned and set in motion by the staff officer Guy Dawnay, was effective and historically important.

At German-assisted Ottoman HQ, rumours garnered from various sources about British movements were alembicated into hard intelligence about the fictional attack on Smyrna. Enemy troops were braced and reinforced in the wrong places. Thus no U-boats were ready to stop the invaders when they eventually came to Suvla Bay in August. Meanwhile, 25,000 men were landed secretly, by night, at Anzac Cove, and then packed into concealed trenches. Australian tunnellers, many of them ex-goldminers, dug new saps towards the Turkish lines for a lightning surprise attack at Lone Pine on 6th August. Hopes were high for a coordinated breakthrough.

Tragically, the Suvla landings and attacks fell apart in exhaustion and indecision because the chain of command did not join up the dots of what they were supposed to be doing. At Suvla, the elderly General Stopford thought his only job was to make camp by the bay and wait for the howitzers to be supplied. At Anzac, a desperate plan involving some of the best soldiers took terrible casualties because the mass of new English troops who were meant to sweep round from Suvla and help the Australians and New Zealanders capture the heights were still bathing on the beach.
*