Gallipoli (39 page)

General Hammersley, now perched on the end of Nibrunesi Point, was feeling the heat very much, and he was further upset when a shell fell on his headquarters and killed several of his staff.
Three times in the course of the morning he changed his plans, and no sooner had an order gone out than it was followed by another giving other objectives with other combinations of troops and at a
later time. About 7 a.m. there was a rush for Hill Ten, which had been found at last, and the hundred odd Turks who were defending it were driven off the top. Now was the time to turn east to the
hills—in particular to seize Chocolate Hill and the long spur running out into the plain from Anafarta Sagir, and then to move on to the heights of Tekke Tepe on the ridge beyond. Instead,
many of the troops went streaming north in the general direction of Kiretch Tepe, and even here the impetus soon expended itself. Here and there a brigadier or a colonel was ready enough to go
forward provided someone gave him an order, but even in this there was another complication. The maps which had been issued at the last minute to the officers were marked in some instances with the
Turkish names for the features on the plain. Hammersley’s orders, on the other hand, used the English names for these places; and so it sometimes happened that units advanced to quite the
wrong objectives. Other commanders merely succumbed to what Keyes described as ‘the ghastly inertia’, and refused to move anywhere until their troops were rested. The heat was very
great—about ninety degrees in the shade—and it was often too much for men who had been inoculated against cholera only two days before and whose water bottles had given out. Near the
shore many hundreds went down to the sea to bathe.

In the bay at Suvla the scene was hardly less disordered than on
the land. Everywhere the disembarkation programme was breaking down, partly because of the hidden reefs in
the sea, and partly because a sudden thunderstorm lashed up the surface water for an hour or two. Not a single gun was landed on this day, and hardly fifty mules were got ashore. But the most
serious deficiency was in the water supply. The Navy had never expected that it would have to provide for two whole divisions—it was thought that the soldiers would advance inland, where it
was known there were many wells. Even so the situation might have been saved had not two of the water lighters grounded far out in the bay, and had not many of the soldiers, frantic with thirst,
come crowding down to the shore. They were quite desperate, their tongues blackened, their faces smeared with dust and sweat, and they simply could not wait; they had to drink. Some waded into the
sea and drank the salt water, others slashed the canvas hoses through which the watership
Krini
was pumping out her tanks to the shore. The warships did what they could; one destroyer
captain cut out his water tank and sent it ashore along with his canvas bath and kept both full with his pumps, and later in the day all the other vessels in the bay were ordered to follow suit.
But still it was not enough.

At dawn a juncture had been made with the Anzac bridgehead on the shore, and soon afterwards some of Birdwood’s signallers ran a telephone line around to Hammersley’s headquarters.
In the middle of the morning a message came through on this line to say that from the heights of Anzac it had been observed that there were signs of a general retirement of the enemy on Suvla
plain—carts had been seen making for the hills, guns were being moved back. Heartened perhaps by this, Hammersley got out orders for an advance which was to proceed at least as far as
Chocolate Hill. But he was still only half convinced that he was not confronted by large enemy entrenchments, he was still in doubt about the position of his own forces, and so the orders which he
gave were not very clear. At mid-day the attack had not started, and the brigadier who was supposed to be leading it was tramping back through the heavy sand to make sure that he understood his
instructions. At last in the middle of the afternoon the advance began, but it was
stopped almost at once as the General had decided on second thoughts to delay until 5.30
p.m. when he would be in a position to mount a stronger attack.

And so it goes on, hour after hour, an extraordinary scene in which 1,500 Turks with a few howitzers and not a machine-gun among them were harrying an army of 20,000 men backwards and forwards
across the empty plain. The British soldiers were very inexperienced. Major Willmer remarked in a message to Liman that they marched ‘bolt upright’ without attempting to use the cover
of the scrub, and he added, ‘No energetic attacks on the enemy’s part have taken place. On the contrary, the enemy is advancing timidly.’ But it was not a situation which could
continue indefinitely, and he begged Liman to hasten the reinforcements which were coming down from Bulair in the north.

It was dusk on August 7 when at last the British began to move across the salt lake, but they did take Chocolate Hill. They took it very bravely, considering all the hesitations and frustrations
of the day, and they went on for another quarter of a mile and took Green Hill as well. They were now within a mile or two of the main heights which were the object of the whole attack, and the
Turkish outposts were streaming away before them. It so happened, however, that none of the three British brigadiers who were concerned in this action came forward with the leading troops. They
remained two miles in the rear. And so the troops received no further orders; instead of pursuing the Turks they sat down and waited. When night fell all contact with the enemy had been lost.

The chain of command had now broken down entirely. General Hammersley could not have taken any resolute decision even if he had wished to do so, for he did not know that Chocolate Hill had been
captured until well after midnight, and the news about Green Hill never reached him till the following morning. Stopford continued in virtual isolation aboard the
Jonquil
all day, and G.H.Q.
at Imbros was even more out of touch. Hamilton, immensely relieved that the new army had got ashore, had naturally presumed that it would advance to the hills in the first
light of the morning on August 7, and the second-hand news he received from Anzac and from ships returning from Suvla did, in fact, give him the impression that all was going well. It
was, then, something of a shock when Stopford’s first message came in at mid-day. ‘As you see,’ it said, ‘we have been able to advance little beyond the beach.’ It
hardly seemed possible. But Hamilton was reassured when he observed that the message had taken some time to reach him and dealt only with the situation as it was soon after daybreak on August 7;
surely since then, he reasoned, the advance must have begun. But when no further message came in from the
Jonquil
he began to grow anxious. A little after 4 p.m. he sent off a signal to
Stopford urging him to push on. To this there was no answer.

Thus at the end of the first twenty-four hours at Suvla there had been very little change; the troops were barely two miles inland and the generals were in exactly the same
places—Hammersley on the beach, Stopford on the
Jonquil
and Hamilton on Imbros. The only really new factor was that the Turks, having inflicted some 1,600 casualties on the British,
which was rather more than the total number of their own force, had retired and the Suvla plain was now empty.

There is something so mocking about this situation, something so wrong, that one feels that it is not explained by all the errors and mischances that had occurred: by the commander-in-chief
pacing about his headquarters at Imbros when he might just as well have been asleep, by Stopford lying in bed at sea when he should have been wide awake on shore, by the landing of raw troops at
night instead of experienced men at dawn, by the appointment of elderly inefficient commanders, by the excessive secrecy that had kept them so much in the dark, by the thirst and the heat and the
uncharted reefs beneath the sea. In the face of so much mismanagement things were bound to go wrong, yet not so wrong as all this. Somewhere, one feels, there must be some missing factor which has
not been brought to light—some element of luck neglected, some supernatural accident, some evil chain of coincidence that nobody could have anticipated. And yet it was
quite unlike the April landing. One does not have the feeling that it was touch and go at Suvla, that some slight shifting of the pattern would have put things right again. There is
instead a strong sense of inevitability; each event leads on quite inexorably to the next, and it cannot have mattered, one feels, whether Hamilton went to bed or not, whether Stopford got ashore
or stayed aboard the
Jonquil
, whether the brigadiers marched in this or that direction—the results would have been just the same. Given this set of conditions everything was bound to
continue to its fated end.

But that end was not nearly in sight as night fell on August 7. Nobody had given up hope: it was quite the other way about. A feeling of intense relief had followed the successful landing, and
the generals were sure that given a little time to straighten things out they would be able to move on again.

The night was cold and absolutely still. Away to the south at Anzac the artillery was rumbling steadily, but at Suvla not a gun was fired. No attempt was made to push patrols forward either from
Chocolate Hill or along Kiretch Tepe, and no contact was made with the enemy anywhere. Soon after 5 a.m. on August 8, when the blazing sun came up, the scene remained as it was on the previous
evening; the plain was still empty, no sound of rifle fire was heard, and there were still no Turks on the heights of Tekke Tepe. Willmer had concentrated his men around Anafarta Sagir further to
the south, certain that the real, concentrated blow of the British was about to fall on him at any moment.

Hammersley, in fact, had something of the sort in mind, and he set off early on this second morning at Suvla to consult his brigadiers. He was much discouraged, however, by what they told him;
the soldiers, they said, were too tired to go on—and when the General heard nothing from Stopford he gave up the idea of making an advance.

Stopford’s actions during this morning of August 8 were almost as simple: a few minutes after 7 a.m. he signalled General Mahon on Kiretch Tepe to entrench. At 9.30 he sent a message of
congratulation to his generals and at 10 he communicated his satisfaction to Hamilton. ‘Consider,’ he said, ‘Major-General Hammersley
and troops under him
deserve great credit for result attained against strenuous opposition and great difficulty.’ And he added, ‘I must now consolidate.’

Hamilton was baffled. What on earth was happening at Suvla? Over 20,000 men had now been on shore for more than twenty-four hours, and he knew from the reports of the Naval Air Service that
there was no serious opposition in front of them. Stopford seemed quite contented, but still he did not push on. It had been estimated that the Turks would take about thirty-six hours to get their
reinforcements down from Bulair, and now, on the morning of August 8, there were at the most six or seven hours to go. He sent for Colonel Aspinall and told him to get over to Suvla and find out
what was going on.

Aspinall got his orders shortly before 6 a.m., and he at once went down to the docks at Imbros with Colonel Hankey, but it was not until 9.30 a.m. that they managed to find a trawler to take
them to the mainland. Another two hours went by before they reached Suvla Bay, and there they surveyed with astonishment the scene along the shore. It was, they reported later, like an August Bank
Holiday in England. Hardly a sound disturbed the quivering summer air. Many boats were bobbing about on the gentle swell in the bay, and on the beach naked troops were bathing in hundreds and
tending their cooking fires. Inland beyond the salt lake there was perfect peace. No one was in a hurry, no one seemed to be very busy, unless it was the group of soldiers who were digging a large
entrenchment along the coast. ‘You seem to be making yourselves snug,’ Hankey said to a staff officer standing by. ‘We expect to be here a long time,’ was the reply.

There could be only one explanation of this cheerful atmosphere—the hills had been taken and the front was a long way off—and Aspinall and Hankey went ashore in a much happier frame
of mind. Leaving Hankey on the beach, Aspinall at once struck inland in search of Stopford. He had gone only a few paces, however, when an artillery officer came running after him to say that, if
he did not take care, he would find himself in front of the front line. It was only a hundred yards away.

‘But where are the Turks?’ Aspinall asked.

‘There aren’t any; but no orders have been issued for an advance and the corps commander is still aboard the
Jonquil
.’

It seemed then to Aspinall and Hankey that the best thing to do was to find the headquarters of the 10th Division, and they were directed to a stretch of sand on the south side of the bay. Here
in a moment they learned the full disillusioning truth. General Hammersley was lying full length on the ground with his head in his hands, and it was evident that he was still very much upset by
the shelling of his headquarters and the rush of events since the landing. His chief-of-staff explained despondently that the Army was still pinned to the shore. It so happened that a message had
just come in from Stopford asking them to advance, but it had stated, ‘In view of want of adequate artillery support I do not want you to attack an entrenched position held in
strength.’ In these circumstances both Hammersley and Mahon had decided that it was perhaps wiser not to go forward until the guns
did
arrive. The troops were dead-beat, Hammersley
said, they had suffered many casualties. Perhaps they might get ahead on the following day.

It was now well after noon, and Aspinall, dioroughly alarmed, set off to see Stopford aboard the
Jonquil.
The scene that followed is one of the anti-climaxes of the campaign, and it has
been described by Aspinall himself in his official history: