Gallipoli (40 page)

‘Arriving on board the
Jonquil
, about 3 o’clock, Aspinall found General Stopford on deck. He was in excellent spirits, and at once came forward to greet the
new arrival. “Well, Aspinall,” he said, “the men have done splendidly, and have been magnificent.” “But they haven’t reached the hills, sir,” said
Aspinall. “No,” replied the General, “but they are ashore.”

‘Aspinall urged that he was sure Sir Ian would be disappointed that the high ground had not yet been occupied, and he begged him to issue orders for an immediate advance before the
enemy’s troops from Bulair could forestall him.

‘General Stopford replied that he fully realized the importance of losing no time, but that it was impossible to move till
the men had rested, and till more guns
were ashore. He intended to order a fresh advance next day.’

Aspinall was in a delicate position. He could not himself insist further to a senior officer, and while it was essential to get word to Hamilton immediately, he could hardly
put through Stopford’s signals office the highly critical message he had in mind. He solved the difficulty by making off—‘in despair’ he says—to de Robeck’s
flagship, the
Chatham
, on the other side of the bay. There he found both Keyes and the Admiral in a similar state of tense anxiety about the delay. Keyes was furious. He himself had just
been over to the
Jonquil
, and the visit, he wrote later, ‘nearly drove me to open mutiny.’ De Robeck had already sent a signal to Hamilton urging him to come to Suvla and now
Aspinall added his word. ‘Just been ashore,’ his message ran, ‘where I found all quiet. No rifle fire, no artillery fire, and apparently no Turks. IX Corps resting. Feel confident
that golden opportunities are being lost and look upon situation as serious.’

It so happened that Hamilton did not receive either of these messages; the Admiral’s went permanently astray and Aspinall’s did not turn up till the following morning. But this
hardly mattered, for Hamilton was on his way at last. He had waited for news with increasing impatience all through the morning. At 10 he had been momentarily reassured by Stopford’s message
saying that Hammersley and his men deserved much credit for their work, and he had replied, ‘You and your troops have indeed done splendidly. Please tell Hammersley how much we hope from his
able and rapid advance.’ But soon afterwards his doubts set in again. Where was Aspinall? It was only an hour’s run to Suvla and he had set off shortly after daybreak. Why were there no
more messages from Stopford? Why was he consolidating? At 11 a.m. Hamilton had been unable to stand it any longer: he ordered his duty destroyer, an Italian-built Portuguese vessel called the
Arno
, to stand by to take him to the mainland. And now the evil fate of Suvla added to itself a touch that was perfectly ironic. The
Arno
was not ready. She had developed boiler
trouble, her fires had
been drawn, and she would not be able to sail before evening. Then another ship? The Navy was sorry but there was no other ship.

Through the heat of the day Hamilton remained there, a prisoner on his island, until at last at 4.30 in the afternoon the
Triad
arrived and took him on board. An hour and a half later the
yacht ran up alongside the
Chatham
in Suvla Bay, and Hamilton found de Robeck, Keyes and Aspinall waiting for him there. A few new moves had taken place during the latter part of the
afternoon, but they were very largely a repetition of the morning’s events, a further shuffling round in the bemused coil in which they had all been caught from the first moment of the
landing. It took Hamilton only a few minutes to hear the outlines of the dismal story, and he then jumped into a fast motor-boat with Roger Keyes and Aspinall and headed across the bay for the
Jonquil.

Stopford meanwhile had been ashore for the first time. He had intended to visit Hammersley on the beach at 5 p.m. but he had been a little worried by Aspinall’s visit, and the distinct
breeze of impatience that appeared to be blowing from G.H.Q., and so he had put the time forward by an hour. When he arrived on the beach he found that Hammersley was out, but the divisional staff
assured him that plans were well advanced for an attack on the following day. Content with this, the General returned to the
Jonquil.
Yet another message from G.H.Q. was waiting for him
there. Reconnaissance planes had been ranging over the peninsula again, and they reported there were still no signs of the enemy on Tekke Tepe. On the other hand, reinforcements of an ominous size
had been seen marching down from Bulair, and they were clearly headed for Suvla Bay. Stopford sent another signal to the shore ordering a general advance on the hills, but leaving it to Hammersley
to fix the time for the start. He had barely completed these arrangements when Hamilton arrived.

The interview was balanced on a thin edge of courtesy and was very brief. Where were the troops, Hamilton asked, and why weren’t they in the hills? The men were exhausted, Stopford said.
They must have artillery to support them. After a night’s rest they
would attack in the morning. Why not tonight? Well, for one thing Hammersley was all against a night
attack.

‘We must occupy the heights at once,’ Hamilton insisted. ‘It is imperative we get to Ismail Oglu Tepe and Tekke Tepe
now
.’ But it was insistence in a void, an
argument that no longer had any point, in this strange headquarters in the sea. It might have had a point if it had taken place before the landing, had Hamilton driven it home quite ruthlessly and
clearly to the generals and the brigadiers and the colonels that there was only one object before them, and that was to get inland. But he had not pressed the argument then, he had left things to
Stopford’s discretion, and in the intervening two days his plan had become nothing more than a vague hope hanging in the air. The colonels had told the brigadiers they could not get forward,
the brigadiers had passed this on to the divisions, and now he was talking to a tired general who had foreseen it all from the beginning. Stopford had known all along that the plan would not work:
you had to have guns.

Hamilton said shortly that he himself would go ashore and talk to Hammersley and the brigadiers.

‘Stopford agreed,’ Hamilton wrote that night in his diary. ‘Nothing, he said, would please him more than if I could succeed where he had failed, and would I excuse him from
accompanying me; he had not been very fit; he had just returned from a visit to the shore and he wanted to give his leg a chance. He pointed out Hammersley’s headquarters about 400 yards off
and said he, Hammersley, would be able to direct me to the Brigades.

‘So I nipped down the
Jonquil’s
ladder, tumbled into Roger Keyes’ racing motor-boat and with him and Aspinall we simply shot across the water to Lala Baba. Every moment
was priceless. I had not been five minutes on the
Jonquil
and in another two I was with Hammersley.

‘Under the low cliffs by the sea was a small half-moon of a beach about 100 by 40 yards. At the north end of the half-moon was Hammersley. Asked to give me an idea of the situation he gave
me much the same story as Stopford.’

So now they had the same argument all over again. They
simply could not do it, Hammersley said, not until eight the following morning. Tomorrow was too late, Hamilton
said, were there no troops whatever ready to march? They were asked only to cover two and a half miles, and there were no Turks in front of them. No, Hammersley said, there were no troops
ready—unless just possibly the 32nd Brigade. ‘Then tell them,’ Hamilton said, ‘to advance at once and dig themselves in on the crestline.’

It was now 6.30 p.m. on August 8, and the time allowed for the arrival of the enemy reinforcements had long since gone by. And yet, astonishingly, there was still no sign of any new formations
gathering on the heights. Nine hours of darkness still lay before them; it was going to be a race, but surely there was time for the 32nd Brigade to gather itself together and march the two and a
half miles to the top of Tekke Tepe. If they got just one battalion dug in before dawn it would be enough: the rest of the division could follow later.

Hamilton went back to the
Triad.
He did not communicate again with Stopford, and no one else bothered to inform Corps Headquarters in the
Jonquil
that by the
commander-in-chief’s orders the plans had been changed and the troops were on the march.

Towards midnight Hamilton walked out on to the deck. The night—this third night on the Suvla beaches—was absolutely still. Somewhere in the hills now the soldiers were creeping
upward through the scrub.

A
T
Anzac on August 6 there was no confusion over the plans; the commanders knew exactly what they had to do. During the afternoon the Australians were
to attack at Lone Pine in the south of the bridgehead, so as to give the Turks the impression that the main assault was coming from that direction, and then, after nightfall, the bulk of
Birdwood’s forces were to march up the ravines towards Sari Bair. They hoped to take the crest of the ridge by morning.

The charge at Lone Pine was a particularly desperate adventure, since it was to take place in broad daylight and on a narrow front of only 220 yards where the Turks could concentrate their fire.
Yet the soldiers believed in the plan. They believed in it so well and were so eager to fight that guards had to be posted in the rear trenches to prevent unauthorized men from attempting to take
part. This was a wise precaution, because when the fighting did begin it created a frenzy that was not far from madness, and men were to be seen offering sums of five pounds or more for the
privilege of getting a place in the front line.

Through the midday hours the soldiers committed to the first assault filed quietly into the secret underground tunnel which had been dug about fifty yards in advance of the front line and
parallel to it through no-man’s-land. The sandbags plugging the holes from which they were to emerge were loosened, and they lay waiting there in darkness and in fearful heat, while the
artillery barrage thundered over their heads. At 5.30 p.m. whistles sounded the attack along the line. It was the strangest of battles; soldiers erupting from the ground into the bright sunlight,
others leaping up from the trenches behind them, and all of them with shouts and yells running forward into the scrub. They had about a hundred yards to go, and when they arrived at the Turkish
line they found that the trenches had been roofed over with heavy pine logs. Some of the men dropped their rifles and started to claw these logs aside with their hands,
others simply fired down through the chinks into the Turks below, others again went running on to the open communication trenches and there they sprang down to take the enemy in the rear. In the
semi-darkness under the pine logs there was very little space to shoot; on both sides they fought with bayonets and sometimes without any weapons at all, kicking and struggling on the ground,
trying to throttle one another with their hands.

Although in after years the action at Lone Pine was very carefully chronicled—the attacks and counter-attacks that followed one another through the day and night for a week on end—it
is not really possible to comprehend what happened. All dissolves into the confused impression of a riot, of a vicious street-fight in the back alleys of a city, and the metaphor of the stirred-up
ant-heap persists; it was the same frantic movement to and fro, the agitated jerking and rushing and the apparent absence of all meaning except that contained in the idea of mutual destruction. It
was the kind of fighting which General Stopford could hardly have understood.

Seven Victoria Crosses were won at Lone Pine, and in the first few days’ fighting alone something like 4,000 men were killed there. On this first evening, however, the important thing was
that by 6 p.m. the Australians had captured the Turkish front line and were resisting every effort to turn them out. If they did not altogether deceive Essad Pasha as to the true direction of
Birdwood’s main attack, at least they made it impossible for him to obtain reinforcements from this part of his line. By nightfall the way was clear for the main assault on Sari Bair ridge to
begin.

Mustafa Kemal made one error in his anticipation of Birdwood’s plan; he did not believe that the British would ever have attempted to climb these hills by night. Yet here again the
commanders were very confident. A New Zealand major named Overton had been secretly reconnoitring the ground through the latter part of July and early August, and he had organized a troop
of guides who were to lead the soldiers over the fantastically broken country to their objectives. They had an excellent map of the area which had been taken from the dead body of a
Turkish officer after the May 19 assault. Twenty thousand men, under the command of Major-General Godley, were to be engaged, and they were divided into two columns. The first of these, made up
chiefly of New Zealanders, was to advance up Sazlidere and a neighbouring ravine to the top of Chunuk Bair. The second, comprising British, Australian and Indian troops, was to march on a
roundabout course to the north of the bridgehead, where it was to split into two halves for the assault of Hill Q and Koja Chemen Tepe.

The first column’s offensive opened brilliantly soon after night had fallen. Faithfully at 9 p.m. the British destroyer shelled the Turks at Old Post 3 in the usual way, and at 9.30 the
New Zealanders rushing alongside the searchlight beam occupied the position before the enemy could get back to it. There developed almost at once some of the most brutal fighting of the campaign
along the side of Sazlidere, but the Turks, as Kemal had predicted, were not strong enough to hold. They fell back along a ridge known to the British as Rhododendron Spur,
²⁶
and for a time the New Zealanders found themselves advancing through unoccupied country behind the enemy lines. ‘It was a curious sensation,’ one of their officers
related later, ‘to be marching along that valley in bright moonlight, far within the Turkish lines, without opposition of any kind. One Turk, who rushed out ahead of the advanced guard, I
shot dead with my pistol. He was the only Turk seen that night.’