Gallipoli (43 page)

It was the last gasp of the battle, the final spasm that was to decide the issue one way or another. On both sides the men had been fighting for three days and nights without sleep, and with
very little water or food. The trenches behind them were choked with dead and wounded, and most of those who were still living looked out on their hideous surroundings through a fog of exhaustion.
They lay on the ground, they waited, and they responded to their orders like robots with dull mechanical movements. They were ready enough to go on fighting, but some of them hardly knew what they
were doing, and the end of the nightmare in which they were living was now becoming more important to them than the idea of victory. It had been so hot through the day that water had begun to seem
like the one last luxury in the world, more urgent even than sleep, and when water mules went by men ran forward to lick the moisture off the canvas buckets.

On Chunuk Bair the trenches were barely thirty yards apart, and Kemal got two regiments into his front line very quietly through the night. All depended on whether or not the British guns fired
on this mass of closely-packed men before they could charge with the light of the morning sun behind them.

When there were still a few minutes to go before daybreak Kemal crept out into no-man’s-land and softly called out a few last words of encouragement to his men as he
crawled along. ‘Don’t hurry. Let me go first. Wait until you see me raise my whip and then all rush forward together.’

At four-thirty he stood up between the opposing trenches. A bullet smashed his wrist watch but he raised his whip and walked towards the British line. Four hours later not an Allied soldier
remained on Sari Bair.

It had been a fiercer charge than the one at Suvla, more compact and much more desperate, and most of the Turks who took part in it were obliterated by the British artillery on the open slopes.
But they managed to win back their lost trenches, and by midday on August 10 not a single height of any importance at Suvla or Anzac was in British hands. At Cape Helles the battle subsided to a
fitful end.

T
HE
Suvla-Anzac battles dragged on until the last week in August and, in the way of things at Gallipoli, there were at least two moments when just
possibly the British might have broken through. On August 15, Irish troops thrust along the Kiretch Tepe ridge where the main enemy ammunition dump happened to be established. Liman regarded this
attack as very dangerous. ‘If,’ he wrote, ‘on August 15 and 16 the British had taken the Kiretch Tepe they would have outflanked the entire Fifth Army and final success might have
fallen to them.’

But the British had no such great objects in view. The attack was no more than a chance afterthought of Stopford’s, and the men were so ill-provided with ammunition that they were reduced
at one stage to throwing rocks and stones at the Turks; and so in a day or two it petered out.

Then on August 21 Hamilton delivered a major assault on Scimitar Hill and Hill 60 on the south-east of the Suvla plain, and the 29th Division was brought round from Cape Helles to lead it. The
soldiers fought in an unseasonable fog which obscured the hills from the British artillery at the opening of the battle, and as the day went on scrub fires broke out, filling the air with acrid
smoke. In terms of numbers of men engaged this was the greatest battle fought in the Gallipoli campaign, and the last Turkish reserves were used up in bringing the Allies to a halt at nightfall.
Yet in reality the issue had been decided on August 10, when
Kemal recaptured the heights of Tekke Tepe and Chunuk Bair, and these later engagements were merely a restatement
of the fact that when surprise was lost so too was the battle. There were no serious alterations in the front line.

Stopford continued adamant for inaction and entrenchment to the end. He protested in a series of messages to G.H.Q. that his New Army troops had let him down, that he was still without
sufficient water and guns. On August 13, when the full bitterness of his failure was becoming apparent, Hamilton asked himself, ‘Ought I to have resigned sooner than allow generals old and
yet inexperienced to be foisted on me?’ But he still took no action about Stopford, and it was Kitchener who extricated him from the skein of chivalry in which he was enmeshed. ‘If you
deem it necessary to replace Stopford, Mahon and Hammersley,’ Kitchener cabled on August 14, ‘have you any competent generals to take their place? From your report I think Stopford
ought to come home.’ A few hours later the Field Marshal cabled again, saying that General Byng, one of the men for whom Hamilton had pleaded in vain before the offensive began, was now to
come out to Gallipoli from France. And he added, ‘I hope Stopford has been relieved by you already.’

Next day Hamilton sent for General de Lisle, the commander of the 29th Division, and told him to take over from Stopford at Suvla. General Mahon of the 10th Division was senior to de Lisle, and
Hamilton wrote him a tactful note asking him to accept de Lisle’s orders until Byng arrived. But Mahon would have none of this. ‘I respectfully decline,’ he replied, ‘to
waive my seniority and to serve under the officer you mention. Please let me know to whom I am to hand over the command of the Division.’ He was sent to cool off on the island of Lemnos, and
the other elderly generals were dispatched with less ceremony; one of them who came to Hamilton and frankly admitted that he was not competent was found a job at the base, another was returned to
England with Stopford, and on August 23 Hammersley was taken off the peninsula in a state of collapse.

They were all angry, disillusioned and exhausted. ‘An ugly
dream came to me last night,’ Hamilton wrote. ‘. . . I was being drowned, held violently under
the Hellespont. The grip of a hand was still on my throat, the waters were closing over my head as I broke away and found myself wide awake. I was trembling and carried back with me into the realms
of consciousness an idea that some uncanny visitor had entered my tent . . . never have I suffered from so fearful a dream. For hours afterwards I was haunted by the thought that the Dardanelles
were fatal: that something sinister was afoot: that we, all of us, were predoomed.’

For others, matters had already gone beyond dreams and Philippian visions; some 45,000 Allied soldiers had fallen in these August battles, and the hospital services which had never been
organized to deal with such an avalanche of wounded were for a few days in almost as bad a state as anything which Florence Nightingale had found at the Crimea. Even private yachts which had turned
up from England were pressed into service as hospital ships. But it was the collapse of the Army’s hopes which was the demoralizing thing. When all was over the gains amounted, in General
Godley’s phrase, to ‘five hundred acres of bad grazing ground’; they had enlarged their hold on the peninsula to about eight square miles, perhaps a little less. Now, with Suvla
added to their responsibilities, they had ‘three sieges to contend with instead of two’.

A dull, implacable ennui began to settle on the Allied Army. It was not exactly hopelessness, nor cynicism, it was an absence of purpose in their lives, a mechanical focusing down of their minds
on to the simplest and the nearest things, the next meal, the last mail from home. The ‘awful, horrible, lethargic flies’ persisted, and the high dry winds of the early autumn sent the
dust billowing through the air. Once more the soldiers began to report sick. Many of them were so weak with dysentery they moved at no faster pace than a crawl, and on the Anzac sector in
particular it was noticed that the former
panache
had gone; the men looked old and drawn, and with any exertion quickly lost their breath. They were sent in brigades to rest camps on
Imbros and Lemnos, but
they did not recover; they came back into the line again looking very much as though they had never been away. The Indian soldiers, with their simple
vegetable diet, stood the heat very well, but the others continued with their bully beef and they hated it. Within a few weeks 800 sick men were being evacuated from the peninsula every day, and it
was one more sign of the aimless strain with which they were suffering life rather than living it that the horses which before had been indifferent to shellfire now screamed and trembled at the
report of a distant gun.

Hamilton began a weary struggle to obtain reinforcements from Egypt, where a garrison of 70,000 men was immobilized, but General Maxwell, the commander there, was very reluctant. He was much
concerned, he said, over the movements of the Senoussi tribesmen in the Libyan desert: they might attack at any moment. He could release no troops. Hamilton persisted and got the War Office to
agree to the dispatch of two battalions. ‘That was yesterday,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘But the Senoussi must have heard of it at once, for Maxwell forthwith cables, “The
attitude of the Senoussi is distinctly dangerous, and his people have been latterly executing night manœuvres round our post at Sollum” . . . I have renounced the two battalions with
apologies, and now I daresay the Senoussi will retire from his night manœuvres round Sollum and resume his old strategic position up Maxwell’s sleeve.’ Hamilton, too, was becoming
bitter.

The Turks did not attack. Half their entire army was now in the peninsula, but they too had suffered heavily in August, and were numbed by the same lethargy and weariness. It was the spent
atmosphere of convalescence—perhaps hardly as yet convalescence—which had followed the assault on Anzac in May and all the other major battles. For the time being they had had enough of
mass killing. Once more gifts of food and cigarettes were thrown back and forth between the trenches, and the war ceased to be a matter of rage, of pitched battle in the open, but of individual
professional skill. They sniped. They dug tunnels under each other’s lines and exploded mines in them. They made small raids and feints.

In many ways the men in the opposing trenches must have felt mentally and emotionally closer to one another than to the shadowy figures of the commanding generals and the
politicians in the rear. Like poverty, the extreme danger and hardship of the trenches reduced them all, British and Turks alike, to a bare level of existence, and they were set apart from the rest
of the world. They may have hated it, but it drew them together, and now more than ever they had for one another the friendly cruelty of the very poor. This was an exact and prescribed arena, and
until they were released from it and made safe and comfortable again they were hardly likely to know much about the propaganda animosities and the vicious fears of those who, being behind the
lines, endured the war only at second-hand. For the moment the shared misery of dysentery, of flies, of dirt and lice was all.

Herbert records a curious instance of this detached and clinical attitude in the trenches. ‘The fact is,’ a Turkish prisoner said one day, ‘you are just a bit above our
trenches. If you could only get your fire rather lower you will be right into them, and here exactly is the dugout of our captain, Risa Kiazim Bey, a poor, good man. You miss him all the time. If
you will take a line on that pine tree you will get him.’

Sometimes the Turks would parley with Herbert across the front lines, but they resented as a rule being cajoled by deserters who had gone over to the British. Once for a few minutes they
listened in silence and then a voice replied: ‘There are still Turks here and sons of Turks. Who are you? A prisoner? Then go away and don’t talk.’

The end of Ramadan, the Moslem period of fasting, came, and it was expected that the Turks might celebrate it with a new attack. But nothing happened. Instead, the Turkish soldiers made what
shift they could to hold a feast in the trenches, and the British at some places sent them gifts.

By September it was already growing cold at night. A strong west wind would drive the sea into the salt lake at Suvla and hold it there until, after a few hours, the water drained out again.
Once or twice there were sharp showers of rain accompanied by vivid
lightning, and then on October 8 a gale blew up. It was an ominous warning for the British. At Suvla some
of the provisioning barges broke loose and carried away ninety feet of the pier; and there was other damage to the improvised wharves at Anzac. ‘Both sides,’ Herbert wrote, ‘sat
down grimly to wait for the winter.’

The Allies were waiting for something else as well, and it was even more serious than the winter. What was to become of them? Were they to attack again or stay where they were?
Could
they stay if Bulgaria came into the war against the Allies? If that happened—and it seemed quite likely now that the Suvla offensive had failed—Germany would have a through railway to
Turkey. New guns and ammunition, perhaps even German and Bulgarian troops, could be brought down to the peninsula. Where were the reinforcements to meet them? And whether they were reinforced or
not, how was the Navy to keep supplying the peninsula in heavy seas?

The soldiers in the ranks were aware that their fate was being decided in London and Paris, and they discussed the matter interminably in their dugouts. But there was never any definite news.
They simply waited.

Hamilton knew what was going on in London, but it was so secret, so sensational and it so often blew hot and cold from week to week that he was not even able to confide in his corps commanders.
In August he admitted to Kitchener that he had failed and could do no more unless he was reinforced again: and he needed another 95,000 men. Kitchener in reply said, in effect, that Gallipoli had
been given its chance and lost it. The War Cabinet was now turning its mind back to France, and he had agreed to support Joffre in a vast offensive on the western front in September. Seventy French
and British divisions were to be employed, and this meant that apart from normal replacements nothing more could be done for Gallipoli at the moment.