Churchill's Wizards (11 page)

It was all a great disappointment. Forty thousand men were killed and wounded on the peninsula in August to gain only a few square miles. September 1915 was made miserable by dysentery and diarrhoea, ‘between the Devil and the W. C.' The Dardanelles project was slowly strangling, but the legs still madly kicked. In October, Churchill proposed using poison gas on the Turks, and Roger Keyes wanted to crash ships through the Chanak Narrows; in November Kitchener considered attacking Bulair, and there were other wild schemes.

The Aegean was still glorious to look at that autumn. Norman Wilkinson's watercolour sketches from Gallipoli make thirty full-page plates in his 1915 book
The Dardanelles
. These elegant sea-and landscapes depict no horrors. By the white tents of a dressing station on the white sands of ‘A' beach at Suvla you see netting draped over poles, more for shade than for camouflage, not bloody bandages. You sense a large human enterprise nonetheless dwarfed by vast spaces of sea, sky and intractable land. There are long views of balloon ships, submarines, seaplanes, the
Aquitania
converted into a huge floating hospital. The bright stillness and depth of the paintings is like the slow daze of a holiday afternoon.

And then, suddenly, the whole fleet sailed away. In a flash of fireworks, they vanished. At Troy, the departure of the Greek fleet was the prelude to the deception: the Trojan Horse was left behind on the
shore with a special forces unit hiding inside. At Gallipoli, by contrast, the sailing away was the climax of the deception, leaving the Turks only empty trenches on the hills and burnt offerings on the beach.

The evacuation of Gallipoli was the best thing about the campaign. A. J. P. Taylor called it ‘the successful end to a sad adventure' and Brigadier John Monash, the Jewish engineer who fought in the Peninsula and went on to become Australia's greatest WW1 general, said it was ‘a most brilliant conception, brilliantly organised, and brilliantly executed – and will, I am sure, rank as the greatest joke in the whole range of military history'.

On 11 October 1915, Kitchener asked Hamilton what losses could be expected if the army pulled out: ‘50 per cent', was the gloomy reply. So, on 16 October, Sir Ian Hamilton was relieved of his command and replaced by Sir Charles Monro, who visited Suvla, Anzac and Helles in one day and on the next, 31 October, recommended evacuating the peninsula. ‘He came, he saw, he capitulated,' said Churchill. (Most commentators call this bon mot unfair.) Lord Kitchener himself visited. He had come out eager to push on, but after seeing the rough terrain he sent a telegram to Asquith saying that ‘the country is much more difficult than I imagined'.

Back home the architect of the Dardanelles scheme finally made his farewell speech to the House of Commons, resigning from Asquith's coalition cabinet. Winston Churchill was off to join his regiment, as a major, in France. Kitchener was the only one of Churchill's colleagues who formally visited him when he left the Admiralty, an act of kindness the younger man never forgot. But the age of Kitchener was ending in contradictions. His manly, moustachioed face concealed a love of fine china and furnishings, his decisive speech masked a havering temperament, and he simply could not make up his mind about what had to be done in Gallipoli. ‘K' blew hot, ‘K' blew cold; aides danced attendance and tried to decipher the icon's intentions. Lloyd George had noted Kitchener's ‘concealment of his limitations under a cloak of professional secrecy'; and John Buchan said that Kitchener was a poor administrator protected by ‘that air of mystery and taciturnity which the ordinary man loves to associate with a great soldier'. Herbert Asquith's wife Margot dismissed him as ‘a great poster', and the Prime Minister was already plotting to get rid of him; Sir William Robertson was rising to become CIGS in Kitchener's place.

Winter came hard and fast to Gallipoli on 27 November 1915. Twenty-four hours of heavy rain caused flash floods at Suvla that swept down ravines and through trenches and dugouts, drowning over 200 men and resurrecting the bones of the not-long dead. A southwest gale destroyed jetties, and beached a destroyer. Then the wind veered round to the north and temperatures plummeted for two days and nights; thousands of Anzacs experienced their first-ever snow and ice as severe exposure, frostbite and gangrene. Royal Fusilier sentries were found grey and frozen, dead at gelid parapets. Shivering men in stiffened blankets tried to thaw out over tiny flames, while the cruel potshot at enemies scavenging kindling in the open.

On 7 December the British Government decided to evacuate Suvla and Anzac, but to stand firm in Helles at the toe of the peninsula. Anxieties about losing face before the Muslim world had to be squared with military realism. The next day Monro ordered General Birdwood to execute the plans that Colonel Aspinall-Oglander and Lieutenant Colonel Brudenell White had been carefully working up. After a quarter of a million casualties in eight months, it was time to cut and run.

Complete secrecy now was vital: careless talk could cost thousands of lives. In cabinet in London on 24 November, a fearful Lord Curzon had painted the nightmare of a retreat being shelled to shambles, with awful political repercussions. The fact that Lord Milner and Lord Ribblesdale had loudly debated ‘Evacuation of the Peninsula' in the House of Lords in October and November accidentally misdirected the Turks and Germans. They could not credit such stupidity and carelessness among intelligent people, so supposed the debate was just propaganda.

In the days before Christmas 1915, life appeared to be going on as normal in daylight at Suvla and Anzac, with men disembarking, mules going up the line with stores, the occasional sniper-shot. In fact, the same teams of men were disembarking each day, and the panniers and boxes were empty. Every night, according to the plan, thousands of men were slipping away down to the beach and making their way to the boats, the sick and wounded first, then PoWs, then batches of infantry. There was fierce competition to be the last to leave; men who had been in the initial landings on 25 April won that risky honour. As the trenches emptied, the rearguard left behind rifles wedged in the parapet. They were rigged to self-fire by a wire or cord round the trigger, linked to a Heath Robinson mechanism of cans that dripped
water or trickled sand till the lower can had enough weight to exert a finger's pressure. Lone individuals tended their friends' graves for the last time, moved from loophole to loophole, setting booby traps and mines and pulling barbed wire across communication trenches, then raced downhill with boots muffled by sacking. Evacuation was risky; the advance estimate of casualties ranged from 25,000 to more than 40,000. In the event, the British managed gradually to drain away in secret, until at 4 a.m. on Monday, 20 December 1915, 83,048 people had gone from Suvla and Anzac, with only a few minor injuries, most caused by alcohol.

Incredibly, the miracle was repeated at Helles, starting on 28 December and ending early on 9 January 1916, two days after the Allies beat off a major Turkish attack. Through the hulk of the
River
Clyde
and from other jetties, some 35,000 men, 4,000 animals, 110 guns and 1,000 tons of stores were all evacuated by 3.45 a.m. They tried to destroy everything they left: gun-spiking, sandbag-slashing, pouring away drink, spoiling flour and fuel. Men shot over 500 mules and horses on the beach (though the kinder ones freed their donkeys and left them with fodder for the Turks to find). Finally, they set off the charges under a mountain of oil-soaked kit: volcanic explosions mushroomed flames into the night sky, rained debris on the last boats leaving and started, too late, a terrific firework show of enemy shooting and shelling. When the Turks eventually put out the flames they still found more useful materiel than you could shake a stick at. It took two years to ship it all to Istanbul.

German Intelligence found this magical
coup de théâtre
impossible, and promptly spread the plausible rumour that the British had bribed the Turks to let them slip away. Churchill himself wrote to his wife on 13 January 1916, ‘Perhaps a little money changed hands & rendered this scuttle of “imperishable memory” less dangerous than it looked.' Noble-minded Henry Nevinson denied it: ‘That malignant depreciation of a most skilful enterprise was a libel both on the enemy and on our own officers and men. There was not a vestige of truth in it.' There is no evidence of a deal. In 1916, however, the British offer of a £2 million bribe or
douceur
to the Ottoman Turks to release their besieged army, trapped in Iraq at Kut-al-Amara, is well attested. Anything is possible. In his
Room 40: British Naval Intelligence
1914–18
, Patrick Beesly tells what he himself calls the ‘somewhat
unbelievable story' that earlier in 1915 Admiral Reginald Hall had authorised two merchant agents in Turkey to spend up to £4 million to try and buy a passage through the Dardanelles from the Young Turks. If that bribe had worked, there would have been no Gallipoli campaign at all.

The official historian, Brigadier General Sir James E. Edmonds, in
A
Short History of World War I
writes: ‘Camouflage, already practised, was officially recognized under that name in June 1915, and by 1 January 1916 the service and the manufacture of material were definitely organized.' In this statement, the former Royal Engineers' director of works in France camouflages a lot of activity under bland bureaucratese.

Major General Sir Robert Porter of the Second Army in France said that towards the end of 1915 one of his officers handed him a large file of papers with drawings and descriptions showing how troops, guns and camps could be concealed from the enemy. This packet came from the painter Solomon J. Solomon, last seen badgering
The Times
and doing experiments at Woolwich, who complained in his accompanying letter that he had been sitting on the steps of the War Office for six weeks trying to get an interview with someone about the importance of camouflage.

Somehow Solomon's papers got up to the Second Army commander, General Sir Herbert Plumer, a man who looked like David Low's choleric cartoon figure Colonel Blimp, red-faced, white-moustached, pot-bellied. But Plumer knew cover was important from his experience of leading irregular troops in Matabeleland under Baden-Powell, fighting the Boers in South Africa. Plumer, known as ‘Old Plum-and-Apple' and respected as a conscientious general who looked after the lives of his soldiers, saw that Solomon was summoned to France to get concealment going. Early in December, the War Office arranged for Solomon to visit the front in France, to report on what French
camoufleurs
were up to and give an opinion on whether the British should be doing something similar.

Solomon crossed the English Channel to the war zone on a crowded
troopship, wearing an inflatable waistcoat under his fur coat lest he should be torpedoed. Near the harbour, he noticed the string of small craft supporting underwater steel netting that protected troopships against German submarines. In Boulogne he was met by a lieutenant from the Royal Engineers. The British Army had decided to put the new
camoufleurs
in with the sappers, on the grounds that if engineers built things, they could hide them as well. In his biography
Kitchener
:
the Man behind the Legend
, Philip Warner points out that camouflage and deception fall naturally into the province of the sappers not only because ‘they have materials for making replicas and deception targets, but because engineers look at landscapes with a more understanding eye than most other soldiers do'.

The officer sent to meet Solomon, Lieutenant Malcolm Wingate of 459th Field Company, Royal Engineers, was the younger son of the Governor General of the Sudan and Sirdar (Commander-in-Chief) of the Egyptian Army, Sir Reginald Wingate. Malcolm Wingate went on to win the DSO, the MC and the Croix de Guerre before being killed in action near Arras on 21 March 1918, and Solomon always remembered his kindness. The painter was out of his depth in the military world; his artist's temperament put him at odds with soldiers' codes of rank, form and procedure, which he found meaningless and stupid. Wingate, however, made a gentlemanly escort for him, driving Solomon to GHQ at St Omer to dine with the engineer-in-chief, General Fowke, and the next day on to the French camouflage atelier at Amiens, the hub of invention and experimentation. Here artists were working out the right colours for disguising and screening and also making realistic dummies, including armoured trees for use as observation posts. Solomon hit it off famously with the French painters, some of whom had been, like him, at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, but he somehow also got the incorrect idea that
camoufleurs
were not under military control. Many of Solomon's future frustrations and disappointments sprang from this misapprehension.

Solomon was shown round GHQ at St Omer and taken to dine at the château of the commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Sir John French. However, French was away in Paris, and his temporary house-guest, Winston Churchill, was dining out that night, so Solomon met neither.

By December 1915, the tectonic plates of British command on the Western Front were shifting. Solomon arrived in French's very last
days; he had stayed on after the disastrous Battle of Loos in late September only to be outmanoeuvred in October and November by General Sir Douglas Haig (who was now telling influential people, including King George V, that Sir John had muffed things at Loos). The two soldiers were opposites. Philip Chetwode said: ‘French was a man who loved life, laughter and women, whereas Haig was a dour Scotsman and the dullest dog I ever had the happiness to meet.' Haig and French came to loathe and despise each other with all the ardour of former friends.

Churchill, however, was still close to French. Fresh from his resignation, the former government minister, now Major W. L. S. Churchill, arrived at Boulogne on 18 November, and the military landing officer told him that the commander-in-chief had sent a staff car. Churchill used the vehicle to touch base with his Yeomanry regiment, the Queen's Own Oxfordshire Hussars, near Boulogne, before going on to the hospitality of French's château. When asked by French what he wanted to do, Churchill told him that he would like to spend some time in the front line with the elite Guards Division. The prodigal son was back in the army again, but he knew he had to master the special conditions of trench warfare as a regimental officer before other possibilities of command could arise. Two days later, Churchill was driven to the 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards near Merville. They had not been consulted and were none too happy about having a politician foisted on them, even though his bellicose ancestor the Duke of Marlborough had once commanded the regiment.

It took three wet hours to get into the front line. The officers started out on horses, riding through the icy drizzle of a late November afternoon. Occasional red gun-flashes stabbed the darkening plain. Habitation gave way to ruins; shell holes and rubbish increased; leafless trees stood scarred and split among fields rank with weeds. At a halt in the darkness, orderlies took away the horses, and they walked the final two miles over sopping fields to the battalion HQ, Ebenezer Farm, a thousand yards behind the front line, an edifice of shattered brick propped up inside with sandbags. Churchill's education in trench warfare began here. He wrote to his wife:

Around the same time Solomon J. Solomon met the Second Army commander, General Herbert Plumer, who had brought him out to France, and went on to Canadian HQ where the bluff and genial General H. E. Burstall, in charge of Canadian artillery, asked Solomon to make forward Observation Posts or ‘OPs', also known as ‘Oh Pips', disguised as trees, like the French did.

Near Hill 63, between Ploegsteert Wood and Messines, south of Ypres, Solomon sketched a tree on a hill in the rain. The next day, with borrowed sleeping bag and gas mask, Solomon found himself at 39th Division HQ at Brielen, north-west of Ypres, where General Percival said he needed ‘Oh Pips' for artillery spotters so he could more accurately shell the German lines. His gunners had found some willows which, if replaced by imitation trees with steel cores, would serve their purpose. Would Solomon go and look?

Sunshine gleamed on the yellow water of the Yser canal, which was bridged by a dozen military pontoons. The opposite bank, nearer the German lines, was piled up twelve feet high with sticky yellow clay thrown up by excavating two tiers of dugouts. Tall poplar and birch grew up beyond that, some broken and splintered by artillery fire. As Solomon watched, a German shell hit a local landmark known as ‘the White Château' in a cloud of black smoke. He sketched the scene on brown paper, thinking white paper was too conspicuous.

They crossed one of the bridges over the canal; the odd bullet from a German sniper whacked into the wood or went whanging off the iron. Solomon noticed that a narrow length of hessian cloth ran along one of the iron rails of the bridge. Like a skimpy towel, the space below it revealed your lower legs, while above it failed to cover your head and shoulders. This screen was intended to give people confidence, but Solomon sensibly thought a solid pile of sandbags on the enemy sides of bridges would give real rather than imaginary protection.

They scrambled up the canal's slippery bank and peered over discreetly. Solomon studied how the tree trunks grew out of the steep slope on the other side, facing the Germans. He was wearing a thick mackintosh and as they moved along the old towpath, keeping low and moving from tree to tree, he found it hot work and hard going.
The thick yellow mud sucked at his feet. Panting in a culvert dugout, Solomon peered through a slot at an enemy machine-gun post in a concrete pillbox known as ‘the mushroom'. The existing willow trees in their clumps and copses were too small for his purposes, but Solomon proposed to General Percival that he make two steel-jacketed trees on his return to the UK.

Back in London, Solomon saw General Scott Moncrieff at the War Office. Scott Moncrieff recommended a firm in Holborn, Messrs Roneo, who worked with hardened steel. Solomon gave them scaled drawings and asked them to make two plywood models. What he wanted was an oval-shaped hollow steel conning tower, bolted together in two-foot sections, just wide enough for a man to climb up in order to see out. To make this OP pass as a convincing tree he needed real bark for the outside. Solomon decided to go right to the top. He would ask King George V's permission to get a decayed willow from Windsor.

On Saturday, 18 December, from his home at 18, Hyde Park Gate, Solomon hand-wrote a letter to the Keeper of the Privy Purse:

Sir Frederick Ponsonby (older brother of Arthur Ponsonby, the author of
Falsehood in War-Time
) replied from the Privy Purse office at Buckingham Palace on Monday, 20 December:

Solomon arranged to go to Buckingham Palace the following afternoon. Ponsonby then wrote a ‘Private and Confidential' letter to W. Archibald Mackellar, Head Gardener at Windsor:

On 23 December 1915, the head gardener himself met the 10.42 train from Paddington in a dog cart and trotted Solomon along the winter riverbank. They selected an old willow which was later cut down and brought entire to the fruit conservatories at Frogmore. Working in the warm royal greenhouse with two scene painters and a theatrical prop maker, Solomon constructed a realistic tree cover for a steel core. Sections and strips of bark were sewn and glued to canvas which could be wrapped around the metal.

Meanwhile, the adjutant general at GHQ in France sent a letter on Christmas Eve requesting that Mr S. J. Solomon ‘be despatched to this country at the earliest possible date, accompanied by sufficient personnel of his own selection to enable him to start work as soon as possible upon the construction of some urgently required special observation stations'.

Solomon started picking a team. They included the black-and-white draughtsman Harry Paget, an older man who had served in the
Artists' Rifles and had some useful military knowledge, shy Walter W. Russell, ARA, the ingenious and inventive Lyndsay D. Symington and young Roland Harker, who was by trade a scenery painter.

There was also ‘a small man, very deaf, who staged the operas at Covent Garden', known to be ‘a good organiser'. It was, in fact, Oliver Bernard, who experienced the sinking of the
Lusitania
. Bernard brought along F. W. Holmes of Leeds, who was head property man at the Drury Lane theatre and a master carpenter when ‘Bunny' Bernard first met him in Manchester twenty years earlier. Solomon, Paget, Russell, Harker, Symington and Bernard all became officers on the low-status General List.