Gallipoli (33 page)

‘The comparison with a seaside resort on a fine bank holiday,’ Compton Mackenzie wrote, ‘arrived so inevitably as really to seem rather trite. Yet all the time the comparison
was justifying itself. Even the aeroplanes on the top of the low cliff eastward had
the look of an ‘amusement’ to provide a sixpenny or threepenny thrill; the
tents might so easily conceal phrenologists or fortune tellers; the signal station might well be a camera obscura; the very carts of the Indian Transport, seen through the driven sand, had an air
of waiting goat-carriages.’

With this, however, all further comparison ended; the dust covered all, billowing, choking and vile, and the Turkish shells came through it with the noise of express trains crashing in the sky.
This noise was continuous at times, and the soldiers endured it, not as a temporary pain, but as a natural condition of life. It was as inevitable as the weather. You were hit or not hit. Eating,
sleeping and waking the long scream went on. These slopes by the sea were supposed to be rest areas, but they were often more dangerous than the frontline trenches a mile or two inland, since they
exposed such obvious targets to the enemy: the piers, the incoming boats, the men bathing. From their perch on Achi Baba the Turks overlooked the whole bridgehead, and when the dust lifted they
could see every tent, every gun emplacement, every man and animal that moved above the cliffs. The horses and the mules were terribly exposed to this bombardment, but they appeared to notice
nothing until they were actually hit. Some blessed lacuna in the brain allowed them to stand there calmly with unfrightened eyes when the bursting shrapnel had sent all human beings to the ground.
‘Fountains of earth, fountains of water,’ a French doctor wrote to his wife; ‘shells cover us with a vault of steel, dissolving, hissing and noisy . . . without this radiantly
beautiful light it would be frightfully sad.’

There were some—notably the more elderly men who were experiencing shellfire for the first time—who simply could not stand it and had to be invalided home: ‘Weak minds were
upset,’ the doctor wrote. ‘Few were able to keep a real and immediate notion of things. There is a physical exaltation which deforms and obscures everything and makes one incapable of
reasoning.’

The cool weather had lasted until the end of May, and during that time the soldiers were perfectly healthy. May was an idyllic
month that year with wild flowers blooming
everywhere, even between the front lines, and tremendous sunsets fell on Imbros and the monolithic rock of Samothrace. The shelling was not really troublesome and the men slept in tents. Then in
June when the Turks set up their big guns behind Achi Baba a furious digging began, and the Army went underground into trenches and dugouts, sometimes uncovered to the sky, sometimes with a sheet
of galvanized iron and a layer of earth for a roof. At first there was no regular shelling from Asia and the side of the cliffs facing south and east was a favourite spot for a home; it was known
as Sea View Terrace. Then one day new guns opened up from Kum Kale across the straits, and the shells burst directly at the front doors of the dugouts which had seemed so safe before. The French
corps held the eastern tip of the peninsula opposite Asia, and they suffered worst of all: 2,000 quarts of irreplaceable wine went up one day. By the end of the month a network of trenches and
sunken roads stretched outward from the beaches to the front line, and it was possible to walk for miles without showing one’s head above the ground.

The colours of the landscape changed. Grass vanished from the ground, and in place of green crops there were now wide areas covered with the fading purple flowers of the wild thyme, the dried-up
sticks of asphodel, an occasional dusty pink oleander, a green fig or a pomegranate with its little flame-coloured blossom on the fruit. All the rest was brown and bare and ankle-deep in dust, a
semi-desert scene. With the increasing heat the summer insects and animals emerged, and many of the soldiers, their lives narrowed down to the few square yards of ground around them, became aware
for the first time of tarantulas and centipedes, the scorpion and the lizard, the incessant midday racket of the cicadas in the trees. Mackenzie, straining his eyes through his binoculars to see an
attack at the front, found a tortoise crawling across his line of vision.

By July the heat reached a steady eighty-four degrees in the shade. But there was no shade: from four in the morning until eight at night the sun glared down and made an oven out of every
trench and dug-out. It was a fearful heat, so hot that the fat of the bully beef melted in the tins, and a metal plate would become too hot to touch. Some of the soldiers
were supplied with topees, but most wore the same uniform which had been issued to the Army in France: a flat peaked cap, a thick khaki serge tunic and breeches, puttees and boots. There were no
steel helmets.

On the heights above, the Turks had a constant supply of good drinking water, but with the exception of one or two springs in Gully Ravine there were no wells in the Cape Helles bridgehead;
water had to be brought by sea from the Nile in Egypt, 700 miles away, pumped ashore and carried up to the front by mules. Sometimes the men were down to a third of a gallon of water a day for all
purposes, and it was even worse at Anzac, where they were forced to condense salt water from the sea.

In the end probably these discomforts were not too much, and the men adjusted themselves. But the thing that was absolutely unbearable was the flies. They began to multiply in May; by June they
were a plague, and it was a plague of such foulness and persistence that it often seemed more horrible than the war itself. The flies fed on the unburied corpses in no-man’s-land, and on the
latrines, the refuse and the food of both armies. There was no escape for anybody even when night fell. No tin of food could be opened without it being covered instantly with a thick layer of
writhing insects. One ate them with the food and swallowed them with the water. You might burn them off the walls and ceiling of your dugout at night but another horde would be there in the
morning. You washed and shaved with flies about your face and hands and eyes, and even to the most toughened soldier it was horribly apparent that they were often bloated with feeding on the blood
of dead animals and men. Mosquito nets were almost unknown, and one of the most valuable possessions a soldier could have was a little piece of muslin veiling, which he could put over his face when
he ate or slept. To avoid the flies some of the men learned to write their letters home in the darkness of their dug-outs at night.

From June onwards dysenteric diarrhœa spread through the
Army and soon every man was infected by it.
²⁰
Many of the soldiers
were able to endure it without reporting sick, but some soon became too weak even to drag themselves to the latrines, and by July, when over a thousand men were being evacuated every week, the
disease had become far more destructive than the battle itself. Quite apart from the discomfort and the self-disgust it created an overmastering lassitude. ‘It fills me,’ Hamilton
wrote, ‘with a desperate longing to lie down and do nothing but rest . . . and this, I think, must be the reason the Greeks were ten long years in taking Troy.’

The flies no doubt were principally to blame for the spread of the disease, but the food can scarcely have helped: the salt and fatty bully beef, the absence of all green vegetables. The
N.A.A.F.I. stores of later campaigns did not exist at Gallipoli, and there were no means by which the soldiers could buy small luxuries to vary the monotony of their diet. There was a rum ration
which was doled out at long intervals, very occasionally they got eggs or perhaps a parcel from home, or even fresh fish (by throwing hand-grenades into the sea) but for the rest it was a
monotonous routine of milkless tea, bully beef and plum and apple jam.

The medical services came near to breaking down during this period; they had been organized on the principle that hospitals would be set up on the peninsula soon after the original landing, and
when this failed to happen hurried arrangements were made to establish a base under canvas on the island of Lemnos, while the more serious cases were evacuated to Egypt, Malta and even England.
Lemnos soon became overwhelmed by the increasing number of casualties and there were never enough hospital ships to cope with the overflow.

And now in June the doctors were faced with this major epidemic of dysentery in the Army. ‘Well, you won’t die of it,’ was the current phrase. But men did die, and the bodies
were simply sewn up in blankets and buried in the nearest cemetery. The great
majority who survived suffered dreadfully, and perhaps unnecessarily at times. Horse-drawn
ambulances bumped down to the beaches with the sick and wounded, and then there would be hours of waiting in the unshaded lighters before they were finally got away. Conditions in the islands were
not much better. On Lemnos the patients lay about on the ground in their thick cord breeches and they were pestered by flies. There were no mosquito nets, and often no beds, not even pyjamas.

Trained dentists were unknown at Gallipoli; if a man got toothache, or broke his teeth on the ration biscuits—a thing that happened quite often—he had to put up with it as best he
could, unless he was lucky enough to find some hospital orderly who was able to make rough repairs.

These things began to cause a growing resentment in the Army. ‘The men are getting pretty tired,’ Aubrey Herbert wrote. ‘They are not as resigned as their ten thousand brother
monks over the way at Mount Athos.’

On June 1 Hamilton had abandoned his cheese-ridden berth aboard the
Arcadian
and had set up his headquarters on the island of Imbros. But the staff there were hardly better off than
anybody else, except that they were not under fire. They had put up their tents on a particularly dreary stretch of coast where there was no shade, and the fine biscuit-coloured sand blew into
their faces all day. There existed close by a perfectly good site on level ground among figs and olive trees, but this was deliberately ignored partly because they did not wish to give the camp an
air of permanence—the next attack might gain enough ground to allow them to land on the peninsula—and partly because it was felt that the staff should know something of the hardships
and miseries of the men at the front. Almost uneatable food was provided to strengthen this illusion. It does not seem to have occurred to the General or any of his senior officers that efficiency
mattered more than appearances, and that a man suffering from dysentery—from the flies, the bad food and the heat—was not likely to give his best attention to his work.

And in fact an exasperating muddle began to overtake affairs
in the rear areas and along the lines of supply. Most of it was centred on Lemnos and its harbour of Mudros
where many of the base installations had been dumped down. Ships arrived without manifests and had to be unloaded before the transport officers could discover what was in them. Often cargoes were
sent in the wrong vessels to the wrong places, or became lost or mixed up with other cargoes. New shells arrived without the new keys which were essential to them. Mail disappeared. A polyglot
crowd of men in transit hung about the shore waiting for orders. ‘Mingling among them all,’ Admiral Wemyss, the Governor, wrote in his diary,
²¹
‘is the wily Greek, avaricious and plausible, making much money out of both of the others (the French and the British) hawking every sort of commodity from onions to Turkish Delight and
Beecham’s Pills.’ At the the front someone invented a phrase which expressed the soldiers’ view of the islands. It was ‘Imbros, Mudros and Chaos’.

There was a fantastic difference between the life of the soldiers on shore and that of the sailors in the warships that steamed by, perhaps only a couple of hundred yards out at sea. A
ship’s wardroom was a kind of wonderland for any Army officer who was invited on board. After weeks of enduring the flies, and the lice in his clothes, and with his eye still filled with the
sight and smell of the decaying dead, he would stand and gaze with astonishment at the clean linen on the table, the glasses, the plates, the meat, the fruit and the wine.

These differences were multiplied still more in the case of the ocean liners which were taken over as transports complete with their peacetime crews and furnishings. Henry Nevinson, the war
correspondent, has related that he was aboard the liner
Minneapolis
just before a major battle was to be fought. He was to go ashore with the attacking troops in the early dawn, and at
4 a.m. he rang for a cup of tea. ‘On this ship,’ the steward informed him, ‘breakfast is always at 8.30.’ A little later when the soldiers were taking
to the assault boats the stewards got out their vacuum-cleaners and went to work along the carpets in the corridors in the usual way. Breakfast no doubt was served at eight-thirty, though there
were few to eat it, and indeed by that time many of the soldiers were no longer alive.

There was no resentment at all about these things in the Army, for the sailors were known to be eager to get into the fight, and it was a kind of reassurance, a pleasant reminder of the ultimate
sanity of life, to have the Navy there with its clean, comfortable ships. ‘It has been computed,’ Wemyss wrote, ‘that in shore fighting it takes several tons of lead to kill one
man: at sea one torpedo can cause the death of many hundreds. On shore the soldier is in almost perpetual discomfort, if not misery—at sea the sailor lives in comparative comfort until the
moment comes when his life is required of him.’

Yet it seems possible that one can make too much of the hardships of the soldiers at Gallipoli, or rather there is a danger of seeing these hardships out of their right context. With the mere
cataloguing of the Army’s miseries a sense of dreariness is transmitted, and this is a false impression; at this stage life on the peninsula was anything but dreary. It was ghastly but it was
not yet petty or monotonous. There can be no fair comparison with the relatively comfortable lives of the soldiers in the second world war, or even with the lives of these men themselves before
they enlisted. Gallipoli swallowed them up and made conditions of its own. With marvellous rapidity the men removed themselves to another plane of existence, the past receded, the future barely
existed, and they lived as never before upon the moment, released from the normal weight of human ambitions and regrets. ‘It was in some ways,’ Herbert says, ‘a curiously happy
time.’ It is a strange remark, but one feels one understands it very well. The men had no cinemas, no music, no radios, no ‘entertainment’ of any kind, and they never met women or
children as the soldiers did behind the lines in France. Yet the very absence of these
pleasures created another scale of values. They had a sharp and enormous appetite for
the smallest things. Bathing in the sea became an inexpressible joy. To get away from the flies, to wash the dust from one’s eyes and mouth, to feel cool again: this was a heightening of
sensation which, for the moment, went beyond their dreams of home. The brewing of tea in the evening, the sharing out of a parcel, a cake or a bar of chocolate, the long talks in the starlight
talking of what they would do ‘when it was all over’—all these things took on an almost mystical emphasis of a kind that became familiar enough in the western desert of Egypt in
the second world war, or indeed on any distant front in any war. There were no pin-up girls; no erotic magazines reached them—they were lucky if they even saw a newspaper from home that was
under a month old—and there were no nurses or Ensa troupes. Perhaps because of this the sexual instinct seems to have been held in abeyance for the time, or rather it was absorbed in the
minutiae of their intensely friendly life, the generous feelings created by the danger all around them. There was very little vice; ordinary crimes became lost in the innocence of the crime of war
itself. Certainly there was no possibility of drunkenness,
²²
and gambling was not much more than an anaemic pastime in a world where money was the least of
things. They craved not soft beds and hot baths but mosquito nets and salt water soap. Promotion counted for a good deal, and so did the word of praise and the medal. General Gouraud, the French
commander who had replaced d’Amade, would form his men up in a hollow square in the moonlight and solemnly bestow the
Croix de Guerre
and the accolade upon some young
poilu
who, they all knew, had earned these honours only a few days or even a few hours before; and this was much more impressive than any ceremonial in a barracks could have been. They were all keen
judges of bravery on that narrow front.