Gallipoli (23 page)

Many stragglers began to come down to the tiny beach on which already 15,000 men had been landed that day. For the most part these men were simply those who had lost touch with their units, and
believing themselves isolated had returned to the only rallying point they knew. Some were in search of food and water.
Others considered that they were entitled to a
breather after a hard day. They dropped in exhaustion on any level piece of ground they could find, oblivious of the bursting shrapnel, and when they woke they were unable to return to the front
because they could not find their way. These leaderless men added to the confusion and created an atmosphere of doubt and discouragement around the headquarters.

By nightfall, from almost every point of the bridgehead, desperate calls were coming in for more reinforcements, for ammunition, for artillery fire and for men to take the wounded away. The
front line, it seemed, was breaking. It was in these circumstances that at 9.15 p.m. Bridges and Godley sent a message to General Birdwood aboard the
Queen
, asking him to come ashore at
once. Birdwood, who had been on shore all afternoon, returned to the beach, and there he learned with astonishment that his two divisional generals, both Bridges the Australian, and Godley the
Englishman, were in favour of an immediate evacuation.

Birdwood at first refused to accept this proposition, but he was persuaded as the conference went on: the troops were worn out and in the appalling terrain there was no reasonable chance of
making any headway. If the Turks developed a counter-attack and a heavy bombardment next day the situation might get out of control.

Huddled together around candles in an improvised dug-out and with the rain falling outside and the wounded all about them, it cannot have been easy for the commanders to have taken a very
hopeful view of the situation. In the end Birdwood sat down and dictated to Godley the following message for the Commander-in-Chief:

This was the message which was placed before Hamilton when he was woken aboard the
Queen Elizabeth
at midnight that night.

The scene in de Robeck’s dining saloon was more oppressive than dramatic, and yet it has an oddly spot-lighted quality that sets it apart from any other such conference
in the Gallipoli campaign: the General standing there in his pyjamas reading Birdwood’s message, the others gathered around him in silence, the orderlies waiting at the door. This was either
to be the ending of the campaign or a new beginning. Just for these few moments the action of the battle stops like a moving picture that has been arrested on the screen, and one concentrates upon
this single group. To gain time, Hamilton asked a question or two of the officers who had come from the shore, but they could tell him nothing more. Admiral Thursby, who was in charge of the naval
side of the Anzac landing, gave it as his opinion that it would take several days to get the soldiers back into the ships. Braithwaite had nothing to say.

For Hamilton there was no escape; he alone
had
to take the decision and it had to be taken at once. Already all available boats had been ordered to stand by for the evacuation. Yet
there was something missing in this unbearable proposition—some one hard definite factor that would enable him to make up his mind.

Turning to Thursby, Hamilton said, ‘Well then, tell me, Admiral, what do
you
think?’

Thursby answered, ‘What do I think? Well, I think myself they will stick it out if only it is put to them that they must.’

It was at this point that Keyes was handed a wireless message from Lieut.-Commander Stoker, the captain of the submarine
AE 2, saying that he had penetrated the Narrows
and had reached the Sea of Marmara. Keyes read the telegram aloud and turning to Hamilton added, ‘Tell them this. It is an omen—an Australian submarine has done the finest feat in
submarine history, and is going to torpedo all the ships bringing reinforcements into Gallipoli.’

Upon this Hamilton sat down, and in a general silence wrote to Birdwood:

In an instant, with this message the action starts moving forward again. Aboard the
Queen Elizabeth
, back on the beach at Anzac Cove, among the soldiers in the front line, everyone
suddenly feels an immense relief, everyone perversely finds his courage all over again. Now that they have got to fight it out the dangers appear to be half as formidable as they were before.

It was the postscript of the letter which contained the required touch of inspiration, for when it was read out to the soldiers on shore they began at once, quite literally, to dig. Here was
something definite to do; you dug your way down to safety. Officers and men alike, on the beach and in the hills, set about hacking at the ground, and as the hours went by and still no Turkish
counter-attack
came in, all the seaward slopes of the Sari Bair range began to resemble a vast mining camp. It was not long after this that the Australian soldiers became
known as Diggers, and that name has remained with them ever since.

But there was, in fact, no possibility of a serious Turkish counter-attack at Anzac Cove that night or even on the following day. With 2,000 casualties in his ranks not even Mustafa Kemal could
do more than launch a series of heavy raids that were never quite strong enough to push Birdwood into the sea. Everywhere along the front, at Cape Helles as well as Anzac, the first phase was
already over. The moment of surprise had gone. Hamilton had declared his plan and Liman was reacting to it. Both sides now began to mass men on the two main battlefields, the Turks still convinced
that they could throw the Allies into the sea, the Allies still believing that they could advance upon the Narrows. At this moment nobody could have persuaded either of the two generals or their
soldiers that they were wrong. So long as their hopes held they were committed to a vast slaughter.

From this point onwards the element of the unexpected gradually dies away from the battle, the chances are calculated chances, the attacks and the counter-attacks foreknown, and only exhaustion
can put an end to the affair.

T
HE
news of the landing at Gallipoli was not released for publication until two days after the event, and it made no great stir in England.
The
Times
in a leading article on April 27 put the matter very clearly: ‘The news that the fierce battle in Flanders which began on Thursday (April 22) is being continued with unabated fury
is coupled this morning with the news that the Allied troops have landed in Gallipoli. But the novel interests of that enterprise cannot be allowed to distract us from what is, and will remain, the
decisive theatre of operations. Our first thoughts must be for the bent but unbroken line of battle in the West.’

A new and terrible phase of the war in Europe had begun. In the very battle which
The Times
was describing the Germans used poison gas for the first time. This was soon followed by the
news of the collapse of the Russian front in Galicia, and of the failure of the new British offensive in Aubers Ridge in France. The Aubers Ridge battle was typical of the kind of fighting which
was to dominate the Western Front for the next three years: Sir John French attacked a German fortified line in full daylight on a two-mile front, and the action was not broken off until nightfall
when 11,000 men had fallen. Not a single yard of ground was gained.

It was the lack of shells which was thought to be the cause of this disaster. ‘British soldiers,’
The Times
said, ‘died in vain on Aubers Ridge on Sunday because more
shells were needed. The Government, who have so seriously failed to organize adequately our national resources, must bear their share of the grave responsibility.’

But it was the loss of the
Lusitania
in the Atlantic which made the deepest impression on people in England through these weeks.
The ship was sunk off the Irish
coast on May 7, 1915 by the U-boat 20, and more than half of the 2,000 civilians on board were drowned. Now finally it seemed that the enemy was prepared to descend to any barbarity, and the
ancient idea that civilians should not be involved in wars was gone for ever. From this point onwards the hatred of Germany in England rose to a pitch which was hardly equalled in the second world
war, except perhaps at the height of the flying-bomb raids of 1944. Revenge, the desire to kill Germans, became a major object in itself, and with this there was an increasing uneasiness, a feeling
that somehow the Asquith Government was mishandling things, and that the war, instead of being short and victorious, might be long and lost. If shells were needed to get the enemy out of his
trenches in France, then why were there not enough of them? Why had the U-boats not been stopped? Why were the Zeppelins still coming over London? Compared to these issues, the novel enterprise
against the Turks at Gallipoli seemed rather insignificant and very far away.

Then too very little information about the Gallipoli campaign reached the public during these early days. A full month went by before the
Illustrated London News
was able to publish
photographs from the peninsula, and the official communiqués were not very helpful. From France a stream of soldiers, either wounded or on leave, returned to England, and their descriptions
of the fighting in the trenches were in everybody’s mind. But Gallipoli was three thousand miles away and no soldier on leave ever got back as far as England, let alone Australia and New
Zealand. To a great extent then it was left to the war correspondents to fill this gap.

Kitchener on principle was opposed to war correspondents, but he had, with some reluctance, permitted the English newspapers to send one man with the expedition, Mr. Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett.
Ashmead-Bartlett was involved in difficulties from the moment of his arrival. Hamilton, though friendly, would allow him to send no messages until his own official cables had reached London, and
this sometimes meant a delay of days. No criticism of the conduct of the operations was allowed by the censor. Nor could there be any indication of set-backs and delays. Ashmead-Bartlett’s
lot
seems really to have been a little too hard at times. He went ashore at Anzac Cove soon after the first assault wearing, for reasons best known to himself, a green hat,
and was at once arrested as a spy. The Australians were about to shoot him when by chance a sailor whom he knew vouched for him. Soon afterwards he was nearly drowned when the ship in which he was
travelling was torpedoed. The only other English correspondent at Gallipoli was a Renter man who was somewhat handicapped by being so short-sighted that he could only see a hundred yards.

Hamilton’s own despatches to Lord Kitchener tended at first to take an optimistic line. ‘Thanks to God who calmed the seas,’ he wrote on April 26, ‘and to the Royal Navy
who rowed our fellows ashore as coolly as if at a regatta; thanks also to the dauntless spirit shown by all ranks of both Services, we have landed 29,000 upon six beaches in the face of desperate
resistance.’ On April 27 he wrote again: ‘Thanks to the weather and the wonderfully fine spirit of our troops all continues to go well.’

Meanwhile a great deal had happened. On the night of the landing the destroyers on the Anzac front came in close and shone their searchlights on the cliffs to prevent the Turks from making a
surprise raid in the darkness. Then in the morning the
Queen Elizabeth
and two other battleships each took a section of the enemy line and bombarded it so heavily that it seemed for a time
that the hills were erupting like active volcanoes. Spotters went up in the kite balloons to a height whence they could see over the top of the peninsula, and with one lucky shot the
Queen
Elizabeth
destroyed a freighter in the Narrows, seven miles away. The cruisers meanwhile came so near to the shore that the sailors could see the Turks running along the cliffs above, and the
Turks in their turn sniped down on to the British officers standing on deck. There was very little the Turks could do to injure the warships, but they kept up an incessant artillery fire on the
beach, and every boat that tried to reach the shore with stores and reinforcements was forced to run through a curtain of bursting shrapnel and machine-gun bullets. Under this barrage the Dominion
soldiers fought out their battle for survival.

It was extremely savage fighting, for at this early stage neither side had any real idea of what they could or could not do, and consequently both commanders committed
everything they had to the battle. Kemal was still convinced that he could drive the Allies into the sea before they had had time to dig in, and Birdwood was still determined to advance against
him. Often the Turks charged directly into the Anzac line, and wild hand-to-hand fighting with the bayonet took place in the half-dug trenches. Three days of this went by before it became apparent
to the opposing commanders that both their propositions were wrong: the Anzac soldiers could not be dislodged; equally they could not advance. Hardly a thousand square yards of territory had
changed hands: and the bridgehead remained there, congested and confined, every part of it swept by fire from the heights above, but apparently immoveable. On the night of April 27, the fighting
slackened, and both sides drew off to rest and gather their strength again.