Gallipoli (17 page)

As always, Brooke was surrounded by his friends. There was
young Arthur Asquith, the Prime Minister’s son; Aubrey Herbert, the orientalist who ‘went to the
East by accident as a young man may go to a party, and find his fate there’; others like Charles Lister and Denis Browne who would certainly have been something in the world had they not been
about to die. To these, new friends were constantly being added; men like Bernard Freyberg, who was in California when war broke out and came back to England to enlist. He joined the Naval
Division.

Soon they were all together in Egypt, living in tents, driving out to the desert to see the pyramids by moonlight, a dedicated group ringed about with its own code and its excitement in the
adventure that lay ahead; and they were completely happy. Then Rupert Brooke went down with sunstroke, and the Commander-in-Chief (whom of course he had known in England) called on him in his tent.
When Hamilton offered him a place on the headquarters staff Brooke refused; he wanted to be at the landing on Gallipoli with his men.

‘He looked extraordinarily handsome,’ Hamilton wrote in his diary, ‘quite a knightly presence stretched out there on the sand with the only world that counts at his
feet.’

Compton Mackenzie in his
Gallipoli Memories
relates how he too was caught up in the Gallipoli fever. He was living at Capri at the time, had just published
Sinister Street
(which had made his name), and was working on the concluding chapters of
Guy and Pauline
. Directly he heard of the expedition he was in a frenzy of impatience to get to Egypt. Friends in
Whitehall found him a job on Hamilton’s staff, and presently he was off down the Mediterranean on the first available boat out of Naples, appalled that as yet he had no uniform, and beset
with anxiety that he would not arrive in time.

Almost all these young men—and thousands of others less imaginative but just as ardent—were facing the prospect of battle for the first time, and their letters and diaries reveal how
strongly the sense of adventure communicated itself through the Army. For the moment the constricting fear of the unknown was overlaid by the newness and the excitement of the occasion, the feeling
that they were isolated together here in this remote place and entirely dependent upon one another. They were determined to be brave. They were convinced that they were
committed to something which was larger and grander than life itself, perhaps even a kind of purification, a release from the pettiness of things.

‘Once in a generation,’ Hamilton wrote in his diary, ‘a mysterious wish for war passes through the people. Their instinct tells them that
there is no other way
of
progress and of escape from habits that no longer fit them. Whole generations of statesmen will fumble over reforms for a lifetime which are put into full-blooded execution within a week of a
declaration of war. There is
no other way
. Only by intense sufferings can the nations grow, just as a snake once a year must with anguish slough off the once beautiful coat which has now
become a strait jacket.’

In the long tradition of British poet-generals Hamilton remains an exception of an extremely elusive kind. One knows everything and nothing about him. Whether one is dealing with the poet or the
general at any given point it is almost impossible to tell. Somewhere about this time—April 1915—there was a remarkable photograph taken of the General on board the
Triad
, and
this perhaps reveals him more intimately than all the diaries and the opinions of his friends. One recognizes the other figures in the group at once. Admiral de Robeck stands with his feet firmly
planted on the deck, his arms clasped behind his back, and his steady, carved, admiral’s face belongs to gales at sea. Keyes at his side, is exactly as he ought to be: a slim, angular figure,
alas not a beautiful face with those big ears, but most engaging. Braithwaite, the Chief of Staff, is the handsome professional; he fills his uniform like a soldier and he knows where he is. But it
is upon Hamilton that one inevitably fixes one’s eye. Everything about him is wrong. He has adopted an almost mincing attitude, his shoulders half-turned in embarrassment towards the camera,
one hand resting on a stanchion in a curiously feminine way and the other grasping what appears to be a scarf or a piece of material
at his side. The fingers are long,
shapely and intensely sensitive, the face quite firm and patrician but somehow nervous and ill-at-ease. His uniform does not fit him—or rather he gives the impression that he ought not to be
in uniform at all. His cap is a disaster. Braithwaite has the right kind of cap and it suits him; Hamilton’s perches like a pancake on his head, his tunic is bus-conductorish, his breeches
too tight for his wilting bow legs. Physically he is the last possible man one can imagine as a commander-in-chief. He simply does not inspire confidence.

And yet it is clear beyond any doubt from this photograph that here is an exceptionally intelligent man—much more intelligent than any of the others. One looks again and finds oneself
hoping that this intelligence, this sensitivity and bird-like quickness, also contains a germ of resolution, perhaps some special sort of refined courage which we had missed before; and still one
remains uncertain.

It is left to his record to reassure us. The General was sixty-two when this picture was taken. He was born in the Mediterranean on the island of Corfu, and had spent the whole of his adult life
in the Army—indeed, he had seen more active service than almost any other senior general. He had fought the tribesmen on the north-west frontier of India, had served throughout the Boer War,
and had been with the Japanese in Manchuria in the Russo-Japanese war. In recent years he had held the appointments of commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean and Inspector-General of Overseas
Forces. According to his contemporaries, Hamilton was one of those unusual men who apparently are quite indifferent to danger. His left hand had been shattered early in his career, and more than
once he had been recommended for the Victoria Cross.

There was one other thing that set him apart, and that was his exceptional talent as a writer. He read and wrote much poetry and he loved to keep diaries in a kind of French shorthand which he
had invented himself; these jottings, he said, cleared his mind and put events into perspective when he was in command in the field. As a staff officer he had been full of ideas. His
Staff
Officer’s
Scrapbook
, for example, had foretold the disappearance of cavalry in favour of trench warfare.

There is a theme running through this life, and that is Lord Kitchener. Kitchener was Hamilton’s star. Fifteen years before Hamilton had served as the Field Marshal’s chief-of-staff
in South Africa, and the intimacy that had grown up between them was a good deal more than the relationship of the admiring junior to his chief; there was a strength in Kitchener, a massiveness,
which appears to have deeply satisfied something which was wanting in Hamilton’s own life. He was quite shrewd enough to see Kitchener’s weaknesses, and in his diaries he occasionally
permitted himself to fret about them as a woman will fret about her husband. But Kitchener had only to speak out and Hamilton dissolved at once. Old K. In the end he was bigger than them all. One
had to protect him from the fools and the critics. Never for an instant does Hamilton challenge his chief’s authority. Never does he fail to pause before taking a major decision and ask
himself, ‘What would K. have done?’ And Kitchener on his side promotes his follower, occasionally favours him with his confidence, and now sends him off to Constantinople.

Henry Nevinson, the war correspondent, has an interesting note on Hamilton’s character: ‘From a mingled Highland and Scottish descent he had inherited the so-called Celtic qualities
which are regarded by thorough Englishmen with varying admiration and dislike. His blood gave him so conspicuous a physical courage that after the battles of Caesar’s Camp and Diamond Hill
the present writer, who knew him there, regarded him as an example of the rare type which not merely conceals fear with success, but does not feel it. Undoubtedly he was deeply tinged with the
“Celtic charm”—that glamour of mind and courtesy of behaviour which create suspicion among people endowed with neither.’

After the war Hamilton was criticized for being so much under Kitchener’s thumb, for being a weak commander, a commentator on battles instead of a man of action. But it is only fair to
remember that he was respected and liked by Winston Churchill
and a great many other demanding people in London. At Gallipoli none of his senior contemporaries speak against
him—not Keyes nor any of the Admirals, not any of the French. The one man who attacks him is a corps commander whom Hamilton dismissed. Under Hamilton’s command there is never any
dispute between the Army and the Navy, and all the Allied contingents serve with him the utmost loyalty.

This in itself was something of an achievement, for the force that was now assembling itself in Egypt was a very mixed bag indeed. There were the French, a splendid sight on the parade ground,
their officers in black and gold, the men in blue breeches and red coats. There were Zouaves and Foreign Legionaries from Africa, Sikhs and Gurkhas from India, and the labour battalions of
Levantine Jews and Greeks. There were the sailors of the British and French Navies. There were the Scottish, English and Irish troops. And finally there were the New Zealanders and the
Australians.

These last were an unknown quantity. They were all volunteers, they were paid more money than any of the other soldiers, and they exhibited a spirit which was quite unlike anything which had
been seen on a European battlefield before. A strange change had overtaken this transplanted British blood. Barely a hundred years before their ancestors had gone out to the other side of the world
from the depressed areas of the United Kingdom, many of them dark, small, hungry men. Their sons who had now returned to fight in their country’s first foreign war had grown six inches in
height, their faces were thin and leathery, their limbs immensely lithe and strong. Their voices too had developed a harsh cockney accent of their own, and their command of the more elementary
oaths and blasphemies, even judged by the most liberal army standards, was appalling. Such military forms as the salute did not come very easily to these men, especially in the presence of British
officers, whom they regarded as effete, and their own officers at times appeared to have very little control over them. Each evening in thousands the Australians and New Zealanders came riding into
Cairo from their
camp near the pyramids for a few hours’ spree in the less respectable streets, riding on the tops of trams, urging their hired cabs and donkeys along
the road—and the city shuddered a little.

This independent spirit was a promising thing in its own way, but for Birdwood, the British officer who was put in command of the Anzac
⁹
corps, there was
a problem here which could not be easily solved. The men were nearly all civilians, and who could say how they would behave when they came under enemy fire for the first time? A period of intensive
training began, but there was not much time.

Indeed, there was very little time for any of the matters which Hamilton had to attend to if he was to honour his undertaking that the attack would be launched by the middle of April. He did not
reach Alexandria until the afternoon of March 26, and this meant he had barely three weeks in hand. The job that lay before the General was, in effect, nothing less than the setting up of the
largest amphibious operation in the whole history of warfare. No similar exploit in the past bore any real comparison: in 1588 the Spanish Armada never did succeed in landing its men on England;
neither Napoleon in Egypt in 1799 nor the British and the French in the Crimea in 1854 had had to face such entrenched positions as Liman von Sanders was now establishing at Gallipoli. In fact the
only operation that could be compared with this lay thirty years ahead on the beaches of Normandy in the second world war; and the planning of the Normandy landing was to take not three weeks but
nearly two years.

Hamilton’s mind went back to classical times. ‘The landing of an army upon the theatre of operations I have described,’ he wrote in one of his despatches, ‘—a
theatre strongly garrisoned throughout and prepared for any such attempt—involved difficulties for which no precedent was forthcoming in military history, except possibly in the sinister
legends of Xerxes.’

There were some 75,000 men at the General’s disposal: 30,000 Australians and New Zealanders divided into two divisions, the
29th British Division of 17,000 men, one
French division of 16,000, and the Royal Naval Division of 10,000. All these forces, together with 1,600 horses, donkeys and mules and 300 vehicles, had to be so assembled on board the ships that
they would be able to land together on the enemy coast under the direct fire of the Turkish guns.

It is a matter of some surprise that the expedition ever got to sea at all. On March 26 Hamilton’s administrative staff had still not arrived from England (it did not get to Alexandria
until April 11), many of the soldiers were still at sea, no accurate maps existed, there was no reliable information about the enemy, no plan had been made, and no one had yet decided where the
Army was to be put ashore.

The simplest of questions were unanswered. Was there water on the shore or not? What roads existed? What casualties were to be expected and how were the wounded men to be got off to the hospital
ships? Were they to fight in trenches or in the open, and what sort of weapons were required? What was the depth of water off the beaches and what sort of boats were needed to get the men, the guns
and the stores ashore? Would the Turks resist or would they break as they had done at Sarikamish; and if so how were the Allies to pursue them without transport or supplies?

It was perhaps the very confusion of this situation which made it possible for the staff to get things done. Since no one could really calculate what the difficulties were going to be it was
simply a matter of taking the material that came to hand, and of hoping for the best. A period of hectic improvisation began. Men were sent into the bazaars of Alexandria and Cairo to buy skins,
oildrums, kerosene tins—anything that would hold water. Others bought tugs and lighters on the docks; others again rounded up donkeys and their native drivers and put them into the Army.
There were no periscopes (for trench fighting), no hand grenades and trench-mortars; ordinance workshops set to work to design and make them. In the absence of maps staff officers scoured the shops
for guide-books.