Gallipoli (16 page)

The defence of the Gallipoli peninsula and the Dardanelles does not present any great mystery, at all events in its broader aspects. The peninsula juts out into the Ægean Sea for a
distance of fifty-two miles, and it has a misshapen lozenge formation—very narrow at the neck, widening out to twelve miles in the centre, and then tapering off again to the tip at Cape
Helles. The hills and the beaches are the important features, since an invading army presumably would first want to land, and then as quickly as possible get on to the heights whence it could
dominate the Dardanelles. There were four beaches: at Bulair at the neck, at Suvla Bay half way down the peninsula, at Ari Burnu, still further south, and at the tip at Cape Helles. Behind all
these landing places there was high ground—it almost formed a spine running down the centre of the peninsula—but the really important eminences were the Tekke Tepe ridge which made a
semi-circle around Suvla Bay, the Sari Bair chain which rose to 1,000 feet just to the north of Ari Burnu, and Achi Baba, a rounded, gently-sloping hill 709 feet high, which was about six miles
north of the Cape Helles beaches and dominated them entirely.

Similar beaches and hills existed on the eastern side of the peninsula along the Dardanelles, but it was hardly likely that an enemy would attempt a landing there, since he would come under fire
from the Turkish guns in Asia, and so from Liman’s point of view they could be disregarded.

There remained the Asiatic side—the danger that the enemy might come ashore somewhere opposite the islands of Tenedos and Mytilene and make his way north across the plains of Troy towards
the Narrows.

It was then, a question of guessing just where the invader was going to strike: at Bulair, where he could cut off the peninsula at the neck, at Suvla and Ari Burnu, half way down, where he
could rapidly cross over to the Narrows, at Cape Helles, where his naval guns could dominate the land on three sides, or in Asia, where he had space to manœuvre: or at
two or three or all these places?

Liman found that he had six divisions known as the Fifth Army under his command, and at the time of his arrival they were scattered along the coastline in a way which he considered bizarre if
not downright dangerous. ‘The enemy on landing,’ he observed, ‘would have found resistance everywhere, but there were no reserves to check a strong and energetic advance. I
ordered the divisions to hold their troops together and send only the most indispensable security detachments to the coast.’

It seemed to the new commander that the point of most danger was the Asiatic shore, and he accordingly posted two divisions there to the south and west of Troy—the 11th, and later, the
3rd, which he had trained himself and which was now on its way from Constantinople. Next in priority he placed Bulair, and here two more divisions, the 5th and the 7th, were disposed. A fifth
division, the 9th, was sent to Cape Helles. To the sixth and last division, which was now under the command of Mustafa Kemal, there was assigned a special role: it was to remain grouped near Maidos
on the Narrows, directly under the commander-in-chief’s orders, and would stand ready to go north to Bulair, south to Cape Helles, or across the straits to Asia, according to where the danger
most threatened. Liman knew all about Kemal’s anti-German views, but he regarded him as an efficient and intelligent soldier; and there may even have been some grudging respect for the new
commander-in-chief from Kemal’s side. At all events, this mobile assignment suited Kemal admirably.

Liman’s headquarters staff in Gallipoli town was Turkish, but he had, scattered through his divisions, a number of German officers in senior commands; and the German gunners and other
technicians remained at the Narrows under a German admiral.

Having placed his forces where he wanted them—and these dispositions have been applauded by almost all experts who have studied them—Liman next got his men into training. They had
grown stiff, he says, in their garrisons, and he now instituted a
programme of drilling and digging. By day the men marched. By night they came down to the coast and worked
on new roads and entrenchments. There was a shortage of every kind of material, and much improvisation was required. Spades and other implements were taken from the peasants, and the soldiers even
dug the earth with their bayonets. When the supply of barbed wire gave out they ripped up the fences of the farms; and on the most likely landing places this wire was spread beneath the surface of
the water. Land mines were constructed out of torpedo heads.

This work was pressed on with great haste, for there were many signs that the Allied attack would not be much longer delayed. Before the end of March Liman learned that four British officers had
arrived in Piræus in Greece, and had there bought for cash forty-two large lighters and five tugs. The British apparently were not very successful in keeping watch on spies in Lemnos and the
other Greek islands, for a stream of information about the Allies’ preparations kept reaching Constantinople by way of Egypt and Greece. General Hamilton’s arrival had been reported. It
was known that a landing pier had been built in the harbour of Mudros, on Lemnos, and that stores and equipment were being unloaded there. Most of these reports came from the Balkans, but even as
far off as Rome German agents were hearing rumours of the coming offensive, and these were duly relayed to the headquarters in Gallipoli. At one time it was said that 50,000 British soldiers had
assembled on Imbros and Lemnos. Then the total was increased to 80,000 with 50,000 French in addition. Though confusing, all this intelligence pointed in the same direction: there was not much time
left.

Each day, too, there was a good deal of enemy activity which Liman could see with his own eyes. Allied aircraft of a newer, faster pattern had begun to fly over the peninsula on reconnaissance.
Like cruising sharks, grey, silent and sinister, the silhouettes of British warships kept ceaselessly moving back and forth far out to sea.

Then in the third week of April there occurred a sudden flurry of activity in the straits themselves.

Shortly after dawn on April 17 Turkish sentries at Kephez
Point saw a submarine come to the surface. Apparently it was heading for the Narrows with the intention of
passing through to the Sea of Marmara, but suddenly it was caught in a violent eddy and began to drift towards the shore. At once every Turkish gun in the neighbourhood was turned on to the
helpless vessel, and as it touched the shore the crew came on deck and were swept into the sea by machine-gun fire. During the next two days and nights an erratic duel took place between the Turks
and the British for the abandoned hulk. In turn British submarines, aircraft and warships came rushing into the straits in an attempt to destroy it before the Turks got possession, but their
torpedoes went astray, the bombs fell wide, and the warships were driven off by the shore batteries. Finally on the third night a little British patrol boat came sailing straight into the glare of
the searchlights and with a lucky shot got one of its torpedoes home.

According to Lewis Einstein, the American Minister in Constantinople, the Turks behaved very well over this incident. When the submarine was first abandoned and the British sailors were
struggling in the water the Turkish soldiers on the shore jumped in and rescued them. The dead were first buried on the beach and then taken to the English cemetery at Chanak, where a service was
said over them. ‘The Turks are extraordinary in this,’ Einstein wrote. ‘One moment they will murder wantonly, and the next surprise everyone by their kindness. Thus when the first
English submarine prisoners were led into the hospital at Chanak, shivering in their wet clothes, the Turkish wounded called them guests, and insisted on their being given everything new, and such
few delicacies as they possessed.’

It was only later when the prisoners were sent to filthy prisons in Constantinople that ill-treatment began, but even then in most cases it was the ill-treatment of indifference, of the squalor
and callousness of the East rather than an act of deliberate revenge.

Meanwhile another warning had sounded on the Dardanelles. On April 19 a company of Turkish soldiers had made their camp in a fold of the hills on the western side of the peninsula. It was the
usual early morning scene: the soldiers asleep on the ground,
the smoke of the first cooking fires rising upwards and the lines of horses and mules tethered nearby. Then
without warning the terrible searing rush of shells filled the sky and everything was in an uproar of cascading earth and bursting shrapnel. Some thought it was an earthquake and lay still in
terror, others ran to the lines of screaming animals and tried to mount and get away, others again who kept their wits went to their guns. But they could see nothing on the flat and deserted sea,
nothing but a tiny yellow balloon on the far horizon. It was not until after the campaign that the Turks learned that this was the
Manica
, the first of the British kite-balloon ships,
trying out a new artillery spotting device. While the vessel still lay below the horizon out of sight from the land two observers had gone up in a wicker basket attached to the balloon at the end
of a long vertiginous swaying cable, and, with the first light of the morning, had seen through their binoculars the peaceful encampment in the hills. It was an easy matter then for the
encampment’s position to be fixed on the map and the news to be telephoned down to the
Manica’s
bridge below; and it was the shells of the cruiser
Bacchante
lying
unseen still further out at sea that fell, so miraculously, out of the empty sky on to the sleeping Turks.

And then, a day or two later, a heavy British air-raid, the first of the campaign, fell on Maidos at the Narrows. Seven 100-lb. bombs, an unheard-of kind of missile in the Mediterranean at this
time, set the town on fire.

After this there was silence again. No more ships attempted to enter the straits and no gun was fired on either side. The weather continued to be unsettled and cold. Among the Turks, who had now
been given almost five weeks in which to prepare their defences, nothing remained to be done but to wait—to post their watchers on the hill tops and the cliffs, to keep gazing out to sea by
day and sweeping the straits with their searchlights at night. The dread of the coming invasion was everywhere about them; but where it would fall, and at what hour of the day or night, and what it
would look like when it came—of all this they had no notion at all.

T
HERE
was a fever of excitement about the ‘Constantinople Expedition’ among young men in England. ‘It’s too wonderful for
belief,’ Rupert Brooke wrote as he was setting out. ‘I had not imagined Fate could be so kind. . . . Will Hero’s Tower crumble under the 15-inch guns? Will the sea be
polyphloisbic and wine-dark and unvintageable? Shall I loot mosaics from St. Sophia, and Turkish Delight and carpets? Should we be a Turning Point in History? Oh God! I’ve never been quite so
happy in my life I think. Never quite so pervasively happy; like a stream flowing entirely to one end. I suddenly realize that the ambition of my life has been—since I was two—to go on
a military expedition against Constantinople.’

Rupert Brooke, with his romanticism, his eagerness and his extreme physical beauty, is the symbolic figure in the Gallipoli campaign. One feels that he was destined to be there, that among all
these tens of thousands of young men this was the one who was perfectly fitted to express their exuberance, their secret devotion, their ‘half joy of life and half readiness to
die’.
⁸

He was just twenty-seven at this time, and the circumstances of his life were almost too good to be true. There had been his lyrical
schooldays at Rugby, where he was
liked by everybody and where he was in all the teams, and all the literary honours were his. Then Cambridge with the dabblings in socialism, the amateur theatricals, the sittings-up all night, the
ramblings through the countryside talking of Oscar Wilde and singing all the way. Like T. E. Lawrence later on he had met and captivated almost everyone who counted in London, from the Asquiths and
the Churchills to the Shaws and Henry James. He had travelled everywhere (though always at the end of a thread that tied him to England), and just before the war had been searching for lost
Gauguins in Tahiti in the South Pacific. It was Churchill who had obtained for him his commission in the Royal Naval Division which had gone first to Antwerp and was now committed to Gallipoli.
More than ever, on the eve of this new adventure, the poet was the hero of Mrs. Cornford’s poem:

Brooke’s own war sonnets were soon to be on everybody’s lips:

All this—the charmed life, the beauty, the immense promise of his talents—was now to be risked in battle in the classical Ægean. It was indeed almost too wonderful for
belief.