Gallipoli (12 page)

The Narrows on this night presented an appearance that was not unlike the scenes that followed the air raids in the second world war. Chanak, a town of 16,000 people, was now very largely
deserted and in ruins. Fires had started during the bombardment and although they had died down after nightfall rubble still blocked the streets and the quays. Everywhere around the forts shell
craters had broken up the ground, and at the Dardanos, a little further downstream on the Asiatic shore, the hillsides were pitted and scarred like the surface of the moon. Coins and pieces of
pottery which had lain in the earth since classical times had been flung up into the air. Only eight of the heavy cannon had been put out of action, but there was much serious damage in the
emplacements, and soldiers worked throughout the night rebuilding the parapets, repairing the telephone lines and righting the guns which had jammed and had shifted their position among the falling
debris.

The behaviour of the soldiers throughout the long seven hours’ bombardment had been admirable. Those who watched the Turkish gunners at Kilid Bahr on the Gallipoli side of the straits say
that they fought with a wild fanaticism, an Imam chanting prayers to them as they ran to their work on the gun emplacements. This was something more than the usual excitement of battle; the men
were possessed, apparently, with a religious fervour, a kind of frenzy against the attacking infidel. And so they exposed themselves quite indifferently to the flying shrapnel and the bursting
shells.

The Germans at Hamidieh Fort and the other batteries on the opposite bank displayed a different kind of courage. Many of these men were gunners who had been taken off the
Goeben
and the
Breslau
, and so they had the precise and technical discipline of the sea. In addition they had improvised with great skill. In the absence of motor transport and horses they had
requisitioned teams of buffaloes to drag their mobile howitzers from place to place, so that the British could never find the range. Field guns
were sited on the skyline in
such a way as to create the maximum of optical illusion. They had too a primitive but effective device by which black puffs of smoke were made to emerge out of pieces of piping each time the guns
fired, and this had drawn some scores of British and French shells away from the batteries.

But none of these makeshifts, nor the discipline and the fanaticism of the defenders, could alter the fact that they had so much ammunition and no more. So long as it lasted they were quite
confident that they could keep the Fleet at bay—and probably this confidence governed every other feeling at this high point of the attack. But if the battle went on and no unforeseen
reinforcements arrived it was obvious to the commanders that the moment would come when they would be bound to order their men to fire off the last round and then retire. After that they could do
no more.

They were convinced that the Fleet would attack again on the following day. They knew nothing of the alarming mystery which had been created among the British and the French by the loss of the
Bouvet
, the
Irresistible
and the
Ocean.
This was a matter which the Germans and the Turks could have explained in two minutes. What had happened was that on the night of
March 8 a Lieut.-Colonel Geehl, who was a Turkish mine expert, had taken a small steamer called the
Nousret
down into Eren Keui Bay and there, parallel to the Asiatic shore and just inside
the slack water, he had laid a new line of twenty mines. He did this because he had seen British warships manœuvring there during the previous day. Somehow in the ten days before the March 18
attack the British minesweepers had never found these mines; three of them, it is true, had been swept up, but it was not realized that there was a whole line of them; nor had they been noticed by
the British aerial reconnaissance. For these ten days the destiny of the Fleet and much else besides had been lying quietly there in the clear water.

To the Turks and the Germans it hardly seemed likely that the enemy warships would make this mistake a second time. And so through this night of March 18 they worked and waited for what
the morning would bring, not over-elated by the success of the day or indifferent to their danger, but simply determined to fight on.

The British knew nothing of all this—of the plight of the gunners at the Narrows or of the preparations which the Turkish government was making to abandon Constantinople. A few of the
leaders like Keyes at the Dardanelles and Churchill in London might have divined that they had now come up to the crisis of the battle, but they had nothing definite to go on, they simply felt the
presence of victory very near at hand. The others felt nothing of the kind. And in fact, through all these weeks while the bombardment had been going on, the old misgivings about the whole
adventure had been revived in London. It was not that the commanders wanted to abandon it; they were eager to push on and believed that it could be made to succeed. But it was increasingly felt, at
first at the Admiralty and then in the War Office, that the Navy would not be able to do the job alone. Somehow an army would have to be provided.

As early as February, before ever Carden had begun the bombardment, Venizelos, the Greek Prime Minister, had been privately approached over the matter. As an inducement for Greece to come in on
the side of the Allies he was offered two divisions, one British and one French, to stiffen his northern flank at Salonika. Venizelos judged that this reinforcement would be just enough to bring
his enemies down on top of him and not enough to hold them off, and he therefore declined the offer. At the end of February however he changed his mind. Carden’s bombardment was going very
well and it looked as though he might be in the Sea of Marmara at any moment. On March 1 the Greeks offered to send a force of three divisions to occupy the Gallipoli peninsula and then advance, if
possible, upon Constantinople.

There is a fatuity about the negotiations which followed that still has power to cause surprise across the gulf of two world wars. It was to everybody’s interest—Russia’s more
than anyone’s—that Greece should come in with her army and buttress the Fleet at the critical moment; yet the arrangements that were now made were precisely calculated to keep her out
and almost lose her
allegiance altogether. Britain and France would have accepted the Greek offer at once. But to Russia it was a matter of great alarm. It revived all her old
fears about the guardianship of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, her one vital outlet to the south. She by no means wished to have the Greeks in Constantinople when she might be there herself.
Blind to the fact that his own military situation was desperate, and that the revolution and his own death were not far off, the Czar permitted himself to say to the British Ambassador on March 3
that in no circumstances would he see Greek soldiers in Constantinople. In particular, King Constantine was not to appear there.

When this news reached Athens the Venizelos Government fell and was replaced on March 7 by a new ministry of pro-German views. Britain and France meanwhile, with an eye to bolstering
Russia’s morale, informed the Czar that he should have control of the Bosphorus as soon as Constantinople fell, and an agreement to that effect was signed in the middle of March. With this
all the Navy’s hopes of getting an army quickly into the Gallipoli peninsula were gone. It remained to be seen what could be done by Britain and France.

In London the chief advocate for an army for Gallipoli was Lord Fisher. ‘The Dardanelles,’ he cried in a note to Lloyd George, ‘Futile without soldiers!’ and he remarked
very sensibly, ‘Somebody will have to land at Gallipoli some time or other.’ The decision on this matter, however, did not rest with the Admiralty; it rested with Kitchener, and
Kitchener had been saying all along that he had no soldiers to spare. In point of fact he did have soldiers who were not then employed—notably the 29th Division, which was a very fine unit of
the regular Army standing idle in England. Through February a lively argument developed between the western front generals and the supporters of the Dardanelles scheme as to who should get
possession of this valuable force. By the middle of the month Kitchener was coming round to the Dardanelles side, and on the 16th he announced that the division could sail for the Ægean. It
would assist the marines already on the spot in mopping up the Gallipoli peninsula, and later
in occupying Constantinople. This brought so sharp a protest from the generals in
Prance that on February 18, the day before the naval bombardment began, the Field Marshal revoked his decision and said that the Australian and New Zealand divisions then in Egypt should go
instead. At this the ships which the Admiralty had assembled for the transport of the 29th Division were dispersed.

But now a new factor came into the scene. General Sir William Birdwood was sent out to the Dardanelles to report on the military position there, and one of his earliest messages to Kitchener on
March 5 was disturbing. He did not believe, Birdwood said, that the Fleet would get through by itself; the Army would have to come in.

One sympathizes with Kitchener, for the situation was complicated. At one moment he is offered a Greek army and at the next it is snatched away. On March 2 Garden says he can get through. On
March 5 Birdwood says he cannot. Nobody at this stage, not even Carden who is ill or Fisher who dislikes the whole design, suggests that the operations should be abandoned. As Churchill wrote
later, ‘Everybody’s blood was up’: the excitement of a naval battle, the sudden vision of spectacular success it had conjured up, the historic ground, the daring of the
enterprise—all these things had captivated people’s minds, and Kitchener himself at last fell under the Gallipoli spell. On March 10 he announced that the 29th Division was to go after
all, and that he had arranged for the French to send a division as well. This meant that, with the Anzac divisions, there would be an Army Corps of some seventy thousand men in the field.

No one knew yet what this large force was to do or precisely where it was to go, or what allies and enemies it would gather on its way. Despite Birdwood’s report it was still thought that
the Navy would break through alone, and still no one suggested that it should suspend its operations until the Army arrived so that the two forces could attack together.

Something of the confusion and the vagueness—the remarkable blending of precipitancy and hesitation—that governed the situation
in London at this time can be
glimpsed from the circumstances in which General Ian Hamilton, an old comrade of Kitchener’s from the South African war, was appointed to command this new army that had drifted into being. It
was on the morning of March 12 that Hamilton was told of his appointment. He himself has described the scene:

‘I was working at the Horse Guards when about 10 a.m. K. sent for me. I wondered. Opening the door I bade him good morning and walked up to his desk where he went on writing like a graven
image. After a moment, he looked up and said in a matter-of-fact tone, “We are sending a military force to support the Fleet now at the Dardanelles, and you are to have command. . .
.”

‘K., after his one tremendous remark, had resumed his writing at the desk. At last, he looked up and inquired, “Well?”

‘ “We have done this sort of thing before, Lord K.,” I said; “We have run this sort of show before and you know without saying I am most deeply grateful and you know
without saying that I will do my best and that you can trust my loyalty—but I must say something—I must ask you some questions.” Then I began.

‘K. frowned; shrugged his shoulders; I thought he was going to be impatient, but although he gave curt answers at first he slowly broadened out, until at the end no one else could get a
word in edgeways.’

Lord Kitchener, however, was not able to be very explicit, for until the Navy had launched its attack on March 18 neither he nor anybody else had any clear notion of what Hamilton was to do.
General Caldwell, the Director of Military Operations, was called in and although he was able to produce a map of the Gallipoli area (which subsequently turned out to be quite inaccurate), the sum
of his knowledge of the situation appeared to be confined to a plan for a landing on the southern part of the Gallipoli peninsula which had been worked out by the Greek General Staff some months
before. The Greeks, Caldwell said, had estimated that they would require 150,000 men.

Kitchener dismissed this idea at once. Half that number, he said, would do Hamilton handsomely. The Turks were so weak on the peninsula that if a British submarine managed
to get through the Narrows and wave the Union Jack outside the town of Gallipoli the whole enemy garrison would take to its heels and make a beeline for Bulair.

At this point General Wolfe Murray, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and General Archibald Murray, the Inspector of Home Forces, came into the room together with General Braithwaite, who
had been appointed Hamilton’s chief-of-staff. None of them had heard of this plan for a Gallipoli campaign before and the Murrays were so taken aback that neither of them ventured to
comment.

However, Braithwaite spoke. According to Hamilton: ‘He only said one thing to K. and that produced an explosion. He said it was vital that we should have a better air service than the
Turks in case it came to fighting over a small area like the Gallipoli peninsula; he begged, therefore, that whatever else we got, or did not get, we might be fitted out with a contingent of
up-to-date aeroplanes, pilots and observers. K. turned on him with flashing spectacles, and rent him with the words, “
Not one
”.’
⁵

Returning to the War Office next morning Hamilton found Kitchener ‘standing at his desk splashing about with his pen at three different drafts of instructions’. There were but three
or four essential points in the document that finally emerged; Hamilton was to hold back his troops until the Fleet had made its full-scale attack on the forts at the Narrows. If this attempt
failed he was to land on the Gallipoli peninsula; if it succeeded he was to hold the peninsula with a light garrison and advance directly upon Constantinople, where it was hoped he would be joined
by a Russian corps which would be landed on the Bosphorus.