Gallipoli (22 page)

It is doubtful however whether the soldiers at Y beach would have acted with very much initiative even if they had known these things, for their operation had been planned in circumstances of
the utmost confusion. Two colonels had been landed with the force, and each thought he was in command. No one had bothered to tell Colonel Koe that he was in fact subordinate to Colonel Matthews,
and in any case neither of the two men had been given any dear instructions. Both seem to have imagined that, far from exploiting the enemy’s rear, his mission was to stay where he was until
the British who had landed in the south came up and made contact, and so all would march forward safely together. Messages were sent off from Y beach to the
Euryalus
through the day asking
for information and instructions, but there was no reply from Hunter-Weston, and neither of the two colonels felt that he could take things into his own hands.

Quite early in the day Hamilton came by in the
Queen Elizabeth
and saw the peaceful bivouac on Y beach. Roger Keyes begged him to put more troops in there at once: the Royal Naval
Division then making a demonstration at Bulair (the demonstration that was deceiving Liman von Sanders), could, he said, be brought down and landed before sunset. But Hamilton felt that he could
not give the order without Hunter-Weston’s consent. He sent off a signal to him: ‘Would you like to get some more men ashore on Y beach? If so, trawlers are available.’ To this
there was no answer, and the message had to be repeated an hour or two later before Hunter-Weston finally replied: ‘Admiral Wemyss and principal transport officer state that to interfere with
present arrangements and try and land men at Y beach would delay disembarkation.’

Thus by midday an extraordinary situation had come about. The main assault of the British in the centre was being held up and was in danger of failing altogether, while two subsidiary forces
which were perfectly capable of destroying the whole Turkish garrison of 2,000 men sat by in idleness on either flank.
Under the existing system of command there was no
immediate way out of this impasse. Hamilton was beginning to understand the position, but he refused to intervene. Hunter-Weston might have put things to rights, but he failed to do so because he
did not comprehend what was happening. All his three brigade commanders at Cape Helles had by now become casualties, and two of the colonels who had replaced them had been instantly killed.
Therefore there was no senior officer on shore, no tactical headquarters which could rally the men and keep the corps commander informed. It was left to the junior officers and the men themselves
to make what shift they could out of whatever resources of courage and discipline remained to them in the bewildering chaos of the battle.

This tragic situation continued throughout the day. The naval gunners yearned to intervene and kept asking the soldiers for targets. But only the most confusing signals came out from the shore,
and so for long periods at a stretch the ships were forced to stand helplessly by in the hateful security of the sea. Often the ships were so close that the sailors could see the Turks running
about on the shore. Then they fired with a will. But they could not always be certain that they were not firing on their own men. The captains kept asking one another on the wireless, ‘Are
any of our troops dressed in blue? Have we landed any cavalry?’

At Sedd-el-Bahr another attempt was made to get the remaining soldiers off the
River Clyde
at 4 p.m., and this time a few did manage to get to the beach. They were cheered on by the
little group who had huddled under the protection of the bank all day. But then the Turkish rifle fire made things impossible again. At 5.30 p.m. the village burst into flames under a new
bombardment from the sea, thick smoke rolled over the battlefield and a red glare filled the evening sky. But it was clear that nothing more could be done until night fell. At Tekke Burnu things
improved somewhat as more troops came ashore, but there was still no help from either flank: at Eski Hissarlik the British commander still judged himself too weak to make the two-mile march around
to Sedd-el-Bahr, and in fact he was expressly forbidden to attempt
it. And at Y beach, where the troops had been left undisturbed for eleven hours, retribution had at last
begun: the Turks fell upon the bridgehead from the north in the evening light, and finding the British had not bothered to entrench themselves properly, continued the attack all night.

The rest of the Y beach story is brief and bitter, and can be conveniently told here. By dawn the following day there were 700 casualties, and many of the men began to straggle down the cliffs
to the shore. Colonel Koe was now dead and in the absence of any clear authority a panic began. Frantic messages asking for boats were sent out to the Navy, and the Navy, believing that an
evacuation had been ordered, began to take the men off. Colonel Matthews with the rest of his force on the cliff above knew nothing of all this. He fought on. At 7 a.m. he drove off a heavy Turkish
attack with the bayonet, and in the lull that followed he made a tour of his position. He then discovered for the first time that a whole section of his line had been abandoned. His position was
now so insecure that he felt he had no choice but to acquiesce in the retirement, and a general evacuation began. At this very moment the Turks, on their side, decided that they had been beaten,
and they too withdrew; and so the British came off Y beach in the same way as they had arrived, without another casualty, without the sound of a shot being fired. In the afternoon of April 26 Roger
Keyes’s brother, Lieutenant-Commander Adrian Keyes, went ashore in a boat to look for wounded men who might have been left behind. He climbed the cliff and walked about for an hour among the
abandoned British equipment. No one answered his calls. A perfect silence had settled on the air and the battlefield was empty.

All this, of course, was unknown and unguessed at on the other parts of the Cape Helles front as night at last began to fall on April 25. The night was the friend of the attackers. Little by
little the Turkish fire began to slacken, and the aim of their gunners became uncertain. At Sedd-el-Bahr the men under the bank on the beach were able to put up their heads at last. Tentatively at
first, and then with growing confidence, they crept out of their
hiding-places to clear away the dead from the lighters and gather up the wounded from the beach. As the night
advanced all the remaining men on the
River Clyde
were brought off without a single casualty. Everywhere along the line a furtive movement began under the cover of the darkness. Men
crawled through the scrub to safer positions, and dug themselves entrenchments in the rocky ground. Others went forward to the barbed wire which had held them up all day and cut pathways through
it. From out at sea the naval guns opened up again, and boats filled with fresh troops and stores of food and water began to reach the shore. Midshipmen and even the captains of ships took a hand
in carrying boxes of ammunition up the cliffs.

By midnight the British no doubt might have gone forward again and perhaps overwhelmed the Turks in the tip of the peninsula. But there was still no senior officer ashore who was able to give
them a lead. It was feared that an enemy counter-attack might start at any moment, and no one as yet had the slightest notion that they now outnumbered the enemy in Cape Helles by six to one. A
dullness, a kind of mental paralysis, had followed the shock of the violent battles of the day, the unknown still loomed before them in the darkness.

The Turks in fact were in no position even to consider a counter-attack. Of their original 2,000 men who opposed the five Cape Helles landings half were casualties. A Turkish message captured on
the following day gives an idea of their condition in the frontline trenches. ‘Captain,’ it runs, ‘you must either send up reinforcements and drive the enemy into the sea or let
us evacuate this place because it is absolutely certain that they will land more troops tonight. Send the doctors to carry off my wounded. Alas alas, Captain, for God’s sake send me
reinforcements because hundreds of soldiers are landing. Hurry. What on earth will happen, Captain?’

Nothing happened. Fusillades of shots broke out and died away. Men fired at shadows. A light rain began to fall. Confused, exhausted, isolated in the small circle of their own experiences, the
soldiers waited for the morning.

Hamilton on board the
Queen Elizabeth
made a 5,000-word entry in his diary that night. In the course of it he wrote: ‘Should the Fates so decree, the whole
brave Army may disappear during the night more dreadfully than that of Sennacherib; but assuredly they will not surrender; where so much is dark, where many are discouraged, in this knowledge I
feel both light and joy. Here I write—think—have my being. Tomorrow night where shall we be? Well; what then; what of the worst? At least we shall have lived, acted, dared. We are half
way through—we shall not look back.’

There were on the whole, he decided, fair grounds for optimism. Hunter-Weston should certainly be in a position to attack towards Achi Baba on the morrow. Reassuring messages had been coming in
from Birdwood through the afternoon: he was engaged in heavy fighting all along the Anzac front, but 15,000 men had been landed there during the day. They should certainly be able to hold on. Not
the least cheering news had come in from the French, who, remote from all the world, had been fighting a private battle of their own on the Asiatic side of the Straits. They had gone ashore a
little late but in grand style near Orkanie Mound (the reputed tomb of Achilles), with a regiment of native African troops, and with a spirited bayonet charge had actually seized the ruined
fortress of Kum Kale. That operation, at least, had been a complete success. The French, having completed their diversion, were ready now to be re-embarked and landed as reinforcements for the main
offensive at Cape Helles. For a while Hamilton pondered the wisdom of this: since they had done so well should they not remain? But in the end he decided to stick to the plan; Kitchener had
forbidden him to fight in Asia.
¹⁴

So then, in general, things were not too bad. Except at Kum Kale, none of the first day’s objectives had been taken, but they were ashore with nearly 30,000 men. Along the whole front
there
had been frightful casualties, but that was to be expected on the first day and no doubt the Turks had suffered heavily as well. At all costs they must push on both
from Anzac and Helles as soon as day broke.

Heartened by this review of the situation Hamilton went to his cabin towards 11 p.m. and fell asleep.

He was woken an hour later by Braithwaite shaking him by the shoulder and calling, ‘Sir Ian. Sir Ian.’ When he opened his eyes he heard his chief-of-staff saying, ‘Sir Ian,
you’ve got to come right along—a question of life or death—you must settle it.’

Putting a British warm over his pyjamas Hamilton crossed to the Admiral’s dining saloon, and there he found de Robeck himself, Rear Admiral Thursby, Roger Keyes and several others. A
message had arrived from Birdwood asking for permission to abandon the whole Anzac position at Gaba Tepe.

Mustafa Kemal had kept up his fanatical attack on the Anzac beach-head all afternoon. At 4 p.m. the Dominion troops began to fall back towards the coast from the outlying
positions they had taken in their first rush. By nightfall they were in a state of siege. But this alone had not caused the crisis in Birdwood’s lines: the fatal error of the original
misplaced landing was beginning to take its effect. Birdwood had expected to seize a strip of coast at least a mile in length, instead of which he found himself in possession of one small beach
barely 1000 yards long and 30 yards wide. Everything coming ashore had to be fed through this bottleneck. Earlier in the day a small jetty had been built. But in the afternoon the congestion on the
shore became intense. Animals, guns, ammunition and stores of every kind were dumped together in confusion on the sand, and there was no question of dispersing them until more territory had been
gained. The whole Anzac position was less than two miles long and about three-quarters of a mile deep. No one could get inland. Bridges and Godley, the two divisional commanders, and their staffs
were crammed together in a gully a few yards from the beach, and the headquarters of the brigades were almost on top of them. Hospitals,
signalling units, artillery batteries
and even prisoners’ cages perched where they could among the rocks.

The wounded meanwhile were coming down from the hills in an endless stream, and were dumped in their stretchers in rows along the shore. Soon the whole of one end of the beach was covered with
them, and there they lay, many of them in great pain, waiting to be taken off to the ships. While they waited a constant storm of bullets and shrapnel broke over their heads; and indeed, everyone
on that crowded beach from generals to donkey drivers was under fire, for the Turks overlooked them from three sides. In desperation one of the officers in charge on the beach ordered every boat
that came ashore to help in taking the casualties away, and this not only disorganized and delayed the disembarkation programme, it exposed the wounded to further suffering as well. Some were taken
from transport to transport only to be sent away since there were no medical facilities on board; all the doctors and their staffs had gone to the shore.

On the front line—or rather at the changing points of contact with the enemy—the soldiers had had little opportunity of digging in. Their light trenching tools were not very
effective among the rocks and the tough roots of the scrub, and at some places the slopes were too steep for them to dig in at all. They were in desperate need of artillery support, but because of
the ragged nature of the country and the uncertainty of the front line there was very little the naval guns could do. By nightfall the situation was not yet critical but it was becoming so. It had
been a long exhausting day, and the men were beginning to feel the intense psychological strain of always being looked down upon from above, their every move watched, their smallest gestures
attracting the snipers’ bullets.