Gallipoli (27 page)

Herbert chose to do his intelligence work in the front line at Anzac, and he proceeded to war in the manner of a nineteenth-century gentleman-adventurer. Servants were engaged at Lemnos,
suitable horses and mules acquired, an adequate kit assembled, and off he went with an extraordinary assemblage of Greek and Levantine interpreters to the peninsula. There were staff troubles
almost at once. A spy mania was raging through the Anzac
bridgehead—the fear of spies seems to be endemic in every crisis in every military campaign—and his
interpreters were arrested as many as four and five times a day. A terrible hail of shrapnel once fell on Herbert’s dugout, and the cook, a Greek named Christopher of the Black Lamp, with the
tears pouring down his face gave two hours’ notice, though why it should be two hours and not two minutes he was unable to explain. Among these and other domestic anxieties Herbert continued
with his work of questioning the Turkish prisoners and of acting as a kind of general confidant of the commanders in all questions relating to the habits and character of the enemy.

His methods of propaganda were very direct. He crawled into the foremost trenches and from there he addressed the enemy soldiers in their own language, urging them to desert, promising them good
treatment and pointing out that the real quarrel of the Allies was not with Turkey but with the Germans. At times he actually got into trenches which communicated directly into the enemy
emplacements, and lying on the dead bodies there, he called to the Turks through a single barrier of sandbags. Occasionally they would listen and enter into argument with him. More often they
replied with hand-grenades—a thing which did not make Herbert very welcome with the Anzac troops—and in Constantinople one of the newspapers announced that there was someone in the
Anzac bridgehead who was making a low attempt to lure the Turks from their duty by imitating the prayers of the muezzin.

It now fell to Herbert to put the case to Hamilton for an armistice. He argued that unless something was done quickly the situation would become intolerable: our own wounded as well as Turkish
were still lying in the open, and in the hot sun the dead bodies were decomposing rapidly. Hamilton answered that he would not initiate any proposal himself, because the enemy would make propaganda
of it, but if the Turks liked to come forward he was willing to grant them a cessation of hostilities for a limited period. It was agreed finally that notes could be thrown into the Turkish
trenches telling them of this.

Meanwhile all May 20 had gone by and unknown to Hamilton and Herbert the soldiers at the front had already taken matters into their own hands. Towards evening an
Australian colonel caused a Red Cross flag to be hoisted on a plateau at the lower end of the line. He intended to send out his stretcher-bearers to bring in a number of wounded Turks who were
crying out pitiably in front of his trenches. Before they could move, however, the Turks put two bullets through the staff of the flag and brought it down. A moment later a man jumped up from the
Turkish trenches and came running across no-man’s-land. He stopped on the parapet above the Australians’ heads, spoke a few words of apology, and then ran back to his own lines again.
Immediately afterwards Red Crescent flags appeared above the enemy trenches, and Turkish stretcher-bearers came out. All firing ceased along the line, and in this eerie stillness General Walker,
the commander of the 1st Australian Division, got up and walked towards the enemy. A group of Turkish officers came out to meet him, and for a while they stood there in the open, smoking, and
talking in French. It was agreed that they should exchange letters on the subject of an armistice at 8 p.m. that night.

While this was going on another impromptu parley with the enemy had opened on another section of the line. It was now growing late and Birdwood, as soon as he heard what was happening, issued an
order that no further burials were to be made that night. A note signed by the General’s A.D.C. was handed to a Turkish officer: ‘If you want a truce to bury your dead,’ it said,
‘send a staff officer, under a flag of truce, to our headquarters via the Gaba Tepe road, between 10 a.m. and 12 noon tomorrow.’

At this stage neither side seems to have been absolutely sure of themselves; there was a tense feeling that some act of treachery might occur at any moment, that an attack might be launched
under the cover of the white flags—and indeed, an Australian soldier who had been out in no-man’s-land came back with the report that the enemy trenches were filled with men who were
apparently ready to attack. Upon this the Australians opened fire on a party of stretcher-bearers who were still wandering about in
the failing light. At once the Turkish
artillery started up again and the bombardment continued intermittently all night.

Hamilton says he was very much annoyed when he heard of these irregular dealings with the enemy, and he dispatched Braithwaite to Anzac to handle the negotiations. The following letter,
addressed to ‘
Commandant en chef des Forces Britanniques
, Sir John Hamilton,’ arrived from Liman von Sanders.

There is an air of fantasy about the conference that took place at Birdwood’s headquarters on May 22. Herbert walked through heavy showers of rain along the Gaba Tepe beach, and a
‘fierce Arab officer and a wandery-looking Turkish lieutenant’ came out to meet him. They sat down and smoked in a field of scarlet poppies. Presently Kemal himself arrived on horseback
with other Turkish officers, and they were blindfolded and led on foot into the Anzac bridgehead. The British intelligence officers were anxious to give the impression that a great deal of
barbed-wire entanglement had been erected on the beach, and they forced Kemal to keep goose-stepping over imaginary obstacles as he went along. Presently the Turks were remounted and taken to
Birdwood’s dugout by the beach.

The conference in the narrow cave was a stiff and strained affair,
the Turkish Beys in their gold lace, the British generals in their red tabs, each side trying to make it
clear that it was not they who were eager for the armistice. But the atmosphere was relieved by one moment of pure farce: an Australian soldier, not knowing or caring about what was going on inside
the dugout, put his head round the canvas flap and demanded, ‘Have any of you bastards got my kettle?’

Herbert meanwhile had been taken into the Turkish lines as a hostage. He was mounted on a horse and blindfolded, and then led round and round in circles to confuse his sense of direction. At one
stage the fierce Arab officer cried out to the man who was supposed to be leading the horse, ‘You old fool. Can’t you see he’s riding straight over the cliff?’ Herbert
protested strongly and they went on again. When finally the bandage was taken from his eyes he found himself in a tent in a grove of olives, and the Arab officer said, ‘This is the beginning
of a lifelong friendship’. He ordered cheese, tea and coffee to be brought, and offered to eat first to prove that the food was not poisoned. They had an amiable conversation, and in the
evening when Kemal and the other Turks came back from Birdwood’s headquarters Herbert was blindfolded again and returned to the British lines.

The terms of the truce had been settled as precisely as possible; it was to take place on May 24 and was to continue for nine hours. Three zones were to be marked out with white flags for the
burial of the dead—one Turkish, one British and the third common to both sides. Priests, doctors and soldiers taking part in the burials were to wear white armbands and were not to use
field-glasses or enter enemy trenches. All firing was of course to cease along the line, and the soldiers in the opposing trenches were not to put their heads above their parapets during the period
of the truce. It was also agreed that all rifles minus their bolts were to be handed back to whichever side they belonged to—but this move was circumvented to some extent by the Australians,
who on the previous evening crept out into no man’s-land and gathered up as many weapons as they could find.

The morning of May 24 broke wet and cold, and the soldiers
were in their greatcoats. Soon after dawn the firing died away, and at six-thirty Herbert set out again with a
group of officers for Gaba Tepe beach. Heavy rain was falling. After an hour the Turks arrived—Herbert’s acquaintance of two days before and several others, including a certain Arif,
the son of Achmet Pasha, who handed Herbert a visiting card inscribed with the words,
Sculpteur et Peintre. Etudiant de Poésie.

Together the two parties left the beach, and passing through cornfields flecked with poppies walked up to the hills where the battle had taken place. ‘Then,’ Herbert says, ‘the
fearful smell of death began as we came upon scattered bodies. We mounted over a plateau and down through gullies filled with thyme, where there lay about 4,000 Turkish dead. It was indescribable.
One was grateful for the rain and the grey sky. A Turkish Red Crescent man came and gave me some antiseptic wool with scent on it, and this they renewed frequently. There were two wounded crying in
that multitude of silence.’

Many of the dead had sunk to the ground in the precise attitude they had adopted at the moment when the bullets stopped their rush, their hands clasping their bayonets, their heads thrust
forward or doubled up beneath them. Nothing was missing except the spark of life. They lay in mounds on the wet earth, whole companies of soldiers, like some ghastly tableau made of wax.

Among the living men there was at first some little friction. Everyone was nervous, everyone expected that even in these awful nightmarish surroundings some kind of treachery had been planned by
the other side. There were complaints: the Australians were stealing arms: the Turks were coming too close to the Anzac trenches. At Quinn’s Post, where the lines were only ten or fifteen
yards apart, the tension was almost a palpable thing in the air, an inflammable essence that might explode at any moment. Hands on their triggers the men watched one another across the narrow
space, expecting at every minute that someone would make some foolish gesture that would start the fighting again. On the wider stretches of the battlefield, however, Turks and Anzac troops worked
together in digging great communal graves, and
as the hours went by they began to fraternize, offering cigarettes to one another, talking in broken scraps of English and
Arabic, exchanging badges and gadgets from their pockets as souvenirs.

Herbert was kept busy settling points of difference. He allowed the Turks to extract for burial some bodies which had been built into their emplacements, and once he was even permitted to go
into the enemy trenches to satisfy himself that the Turks were not using this lull to fortify and advance their positions. He found there a group of soldiers whom he had known previously in
Albania. They gathered round him cheering and clapping, and he had to stop them because they were interrupting the burial services which were being conducted round about by the Moslem Imams and die
Christian priests. From this time onwards the Turks were constantly corning up to him for orders, and even getting him to sign receipts for money taken from the dead. Intervals of bright sunshine
had now followed the rain.

Compton Mackenzie and Major Jack Churchill (the brother of Winston Churchill) had come over from the
Arcadian
for the day, and they stood on a parapet constructed chiefly of dead bodies
to watch the scene. ‘In the foreground,’ Mackenzie writes, ‘was a narrow stretch of level scrub along which white flags were stuck at intervals, and a line of sentries,
Australians and Turks, faced one another. Staff officers of both sides were standing around in little groups, and there was an atmosphere about the scene of local magnates at the annual sports
making suggestions about the start of the obstacle race. Aubrey Herbert looked so like the indispensable bachelor that every country neighbourhood retains to take complete control of the
proceedings on such occasions. Here he was, shuffling about, loose-gaited, his neck out-thrust and swinging from side to side as he went peering up into people’s faces to see whether they
were the enemy or not, so that, if they were, he could offer them cigarettes and exchange a few courtesies with them in their own language. . . .

‘The impression which that scene from the ridge by Quinn’s Post made on my mind has obliterated all the rest of the time at Anzac. I cannot recall a single incident on the way back
down the
valley. I know only that nothing could cleanse the smell of death from the nostrils for a fortnight afterwards. There was no herb so aromatic but it reeked of
carrion, not thyme nor lavender, nor even rosemary.’

By three in the afternoon the work was practically done. There were two crises: it was discovered at the last minute that the Turks’ watches were eight minutes ahead of the British, and a
hurried adjustment had to be made. Then, as the hour for the ending of the truce was approaching, a shot rang out. Standing there in the open with tens of thousands of rifles pointed towards them
the burial parties stood in a sudden hush, but nothing followed and they returned to their work again.

At four o’clock the Turks near Quinn’s Post came to Herbert for their final orders, since none of their own officers were about. He first sent back the grave-diggers to their own
trenches, and at seven minutes past four retired the men who were carrying the white flags. He then walked over to the Turkish trenches to say good-bye. When he remarked to the enemy soldiers there
that they would probably shoot him on the following day, they answered in a horrified chorus, ‘God forbid.’ Seeing Herbert standing there, groups of Australians came up to the Turks to
shake hands and say good-bye. ‘Good-bye, old chap; good luck.’ The Turks answered with one of their proverbs: ‘Smiling may you go and smiling may you come again.’