Gallipoli (34 page)

Yet probably it was the small network of habits that grew up in the trenches that made life bearable to the men. There was a
deliberate playing down of the dramatic and
the dangerous quality of things. The biggest of the Turkish guns that fired from Kum Kale was known as ‘Asiatic Annie’; another was called ‘Quick Dick’, and the most
commonplace names were found for the places where the bloodiest actions were fought: ‘Clapham Junction’, ‘The Vineyard’, ‘
Le Haricot
’. A kind, of
defensive mechanism was made out of swearing and a simple, ironical, hard-boiled sense of humour: ‘Please God give us victory. But not in
our
sector.’ ‘Having a good
clean-up?’ a commanding general said one day to a soldier who was washing himself in a mug of water. ‘Yes, sir,’ the man answered, ‘and I only wish I were a bloody
canary.’

Hours were spent in improving their dug-outs, in picking lice out of their clothing, in cooking their food (pancakes made of flour and water soon became a universal thing), in writing their
diaries and letters.
²³

Some managed to develop hobbies of a kind. There was, for example, a mild fever for the excavation of antiquities among the French. At Lemnos before the landing they had unearthed, a mutilated
statue of Eros at the site of the ancient Hephaestia, and on arriving at Cape Helles they were delighted to find that Asiatic Annie was disinterring other relics. Two huge jars with skeletons in
them were uncovered in a shell crater, and when the soldiers started to dig their trenches at Hissarlik they came on a series of large stone sarcophagi which resounded dully when struck with a
pick. Through the centuries (and at once it was asserted that these finds were as old as Troy), soil had penetrated, grain by grain, into the interior of the tombs, but the soldiers managed to
excavate many bones, as well as vases, lamps and statues in pottery of
men and women. The French doctor wrote again to his wife about one especially beautiful cup: Its long
handles, almost ethereal in their delicacy, give to this little thing the palpitation of wings.’

Living as they did beneath the ground, many of the men became absorbed in the insect life around them. They set on centipedes and scorpions to fight one another, and hours would go by while they
watched the ant-lion digging his small craters in the, sand. Round and round he would go, clockwise and then anticlockwise, scooping up the soil with his great flippers, tossing it on to his head,
and then with an upward jerk flipping it over the rim of the crater. When finally the crater was finished, and the ant-lion was lying in hiding at the bottom, the soldiers would drive beetles and
other insects up to the rim, and there would be the quick scuiBe in the sand, the pounce and then the slow death as the ant-lion sucked his victim dry. In this troglodyte war in the trenches there
was perhaps something symbolic about the ant-lion.

A stream of rumours (known on the Anzac bridgehead as ‘furphies’), flowed through the trenches, and they were usually based upon something which was heard ‘down on the
beach’, or from someone’s batman or cook or signaller at brigade or battalion headquarters. The most lurid stories were passed along: the Turks in one sector had all been dressed as
women, Hamilton had been sacked, the Russians had landed on the Bosphorus and had sunk the
Goeben
, Enver had ordered a general offensive to celebrate the first day of Ramadan on July 12, a
notorious female spy had been captured in a ship at Mudros.

Unless a battle was in progress one day was very like another; the stand-to in the trenches at 3 a.m., the first shots at dawn rising to a crescendo and dying away again; the morning shelling,
the evening bathe, the ritual of brewing tea and the long conversations in the starlight; finally the muffled sound of the mule teams coming up to the front with stores from the beach as soon as
darkness fell.

Occasionally the unexpected happened, as when a German and a British aeroplane, flying low like wasps, fought a rifle duel with one another over the trenches, and both armies held their fire to
watch it; and again when the Turks sprinkled the Allies’ lines with pamphlets in Urdu appealing to the Indian soldiers not to fight their brother Moslems—a device
that had very little success with the Gurkhas, who were unable to read Urdu and who, being Buddhists, loathed Mahomet.

The Air Force had a particular fascination for the soldiers. Being chained to their trenches, the men could only dream of what it might be like to roam far behind the enemy lines. To see the
other side of Achi Baba was to them almost as wonderful as to see the other side of the moon. As for Constantinople, it was lurid fantasy, a vision of minarets and spice bazaars, of caliphs and
harems of jewels and odalisques and whirling dervishes. Constantinople, of course, was not like this at all; but just to have the possibility of winging your way there through the air—this in
1915 had a touch of the magic carpet about it. And there was, in fact, an immense exhilaration in the adventures of these box kites in the sky. Within a day or two Samson had established what would
now be called an airstrip at Cape Helles, and although he was shelled every time he took off and landed he continued there, to the admiration of the soldiers, for a week or two. When finally he
decided that it was more sensible to make his base on the island of Imbros he left a dummy plane behind, and the Army had the enjoyment of watching the Turks bombarding it for a week on end. Some
500 shells exploded on the field before the machine was demolished.

Samson liked to go up in the first light of the morning, and having waved to the British soldiers in the trenches he flew on up the peninsula to catch the Turks around their cooking fires. Then
he would return in the last light of the evening to shoot up the enemy camel teams and bullock carts as they set out on their nightly journey to the front.

Both British and French airmen helped the Allied submarines as they made their passage of the Narrows by flying overhead and distracting the attention of the Turkish gunners; and often they
joined Nasmith, Boyle and the others in the attack on the supply lines at the neck of the peninsula. Once a British pilot succeeded
in torpedoing a Turkish vessel from the
air. There were frequent disasters; a seaplane with a faulty engine would alight perhaps in the straits and then, with enemy bullets churning up the water all around, the machine would limp away
across the sea like some maimed bird until it reached the safety of the cliffs.

These were absorbing spectacles for the soldiers in the trenches; in a world where everything was earthbound and without movement the airmen brought a sense of freedom into life.

As at Anzac, the men at Cape Helles had no personal hatred of the Turks, and there was a good deal of sympathy for them when, after one of their disastrous assaults, they asked for an armistice
to bury their dead. Hamilton, on the advice of Hunter-Weston’s headquarters, refused the request, as it was believed that the Turkish commanders wanted to renew the attack and were having
difficulty in inducing their men to charge over ground that was strewn with corpses.

‘A bit of hate is just what our men want here,’ one of the British colonels wrote. ‘They are inclined to look on the Turk as a very bad old comic . . . one feels very sorry for
the individual and absolutely bloodthirsty against the mass.’ It was a common thing for the soldiers to offer prisoners their waterbottles and packages of cigarettes as soon as they were
captured.

After June it was noticed that a psychological change was overtaking the Army. Whenever there was the project of another battle sickness fell off, and if the men were not actually as eager for
the fight as their commanders pretended them to be, they were at least unwilling to see others take their place. It was the dogged attitude of the man who, having been obliged to undertake a
disagreeable job, is determined to finish it. Always too they hoped that this battle was to be the last. Then, when the attack was over and all their hopes had come to nothing, the reaction set in.
More and more men reported sick. Discipline flagged, and a despondent and irritable atmosphere spread through the trenches. To accept risk in idleness, to wait under the constant shelling without
plans and hopes—that was the intolerable thing.

After the mid-July battles this attitude towards the campaign
became more marked than ever. The number of patients going to the doctors increased in every regiment, and
although batches of them were sent off on leave to Imbros so that they would escape the shell fire for a few days the ennui continued, the sense of waste and loss. There were cases of men putting
their hands above the parapet so that they would be invalided away with a minor wound, but it was not malingering on a large scale; nearly all were dysentery cases, and without the stimulus of
action the soldiers were genuinely unable to find the necessary resistance to fight the disease. Many in fact were so infected that they never returned to the front again.

The situation was not altogether unlike that of the British Army in the Western Desert of Egypt in the summer of 1942 in the second world war. The men were exhausted and dispirited. Nothing ever
seemed to go right; they attacked, and always it ended in the same way, the stalemate, the long boring labour of carrying more ammunition up to the front so that they could repeat the same futile
proceedings all over again. Many of the soldiers began to say openly that the whole expedition was a blunder; the politicians and brasshats at home had tried to pull off a victory on the cheap, and
now that it had failed the expedition was to be abandoned to its fate. This was the real core of their grievances: that they were being neglected and forgotten. The armies in France were to have
the favours, and Gallipoli no longer counted for anything at all. It was true that reinforcements were arriving, but they were too late and too few. The casualties had been too heavy.

This was the surface of things, and in a perverse way there was a counter-current working against it. The expedition feeling still persisted, and perhaps it was stronger than ever—the
feeling that every man on Gallipoli was a dedicated man, that he was part of an adventure that set him apart from every other soldier. None of the general resentment seems to have been directed
upon the commanders on the spot. Hamilton perhaps may have come in for some of the blame, but he was a vague and remote figure whom few of them ever saw, despite the fact that he was constantly
going round the trenches, and in any case he too was regarded as a victim
of ‘the politicians’. The others, the corps and divisional commanders, were too close to
the men to attract their criticism. They shared the same dangers and almost the same hardships with the rank and file, and this was something new in the armies of the first world war, when no
officer was without his batman and there was a strict division, a class division, between the gentleman with a commission and the worker-soldier in the ranks. At Anzac Birdwood made a point of
being in the front line, and the soldiers saw him every day. He was just as much a target for the sniper and the bursting shrapnel as they were themselves. In June General Gouraud had his arm
shattered by a shell-burst, and one of his divisional commanders was killed. Hunter-Weston, made haggard by the strain of too much work and too much unrequited optimism, fell ill of the prevailing
dysentery and had to be sent home. And there were of course many more casualties among the brigadiers and the colonels.

All this brought the officer and the soldier very close together, and however much they may have criticized the men in the rear areas, the hospital staffs and the transport companies on the line
of supply, it was seldom thought that the commander at the front might be wanting in skill and imagination—he simply took orders and did what he was told to do. He was one of them. It was
felt that the solution of their problems lay elsewhere, and it was an intangible tiling, this mystical recipe for the success that always eluded them. Yet somehow, the men thought, there was a way
of breaking the stalemate, of justifying themselves, of proving that the expedition was sound after all. And so underneath all their bitterness and tiredness, the men were perfectly willing to
attack again provided they could be given the least glimmering of a chance of success. As with the desert soldiers in 1942 they needed a battle of Alamein.

The Turks, meanwhile, were not much better off than the Allies during these hot months. The official casualty figures issued after the campaign reveal that a total of 85,000 were evacuated sick,
and of these 21,000 died of disease. By Western standards the Turkish soldiers were very poorly cared for. According to Liman von
Sanders their uniforms were so tattered that
the hessian sacks which were sent up to the trenches to be filled with sand were constantly disappearing; the men used the material to patch their trousers. No doubt the Turkish peasants were able
to withstand the heat and the dirt more easily than the Europeans, and their simpler vegetable diet—rice, bread and oil—was much better for them than bully beef; but they were not
inoculated against typhoid and other diseases as the Allied soldiers were, and their trenches and latrines were kept in a much less hygienic state. By July the Turkish generals were finding it
necessary to send increasing numbers of men home on leave to their villages, and it often happened that once a soldier left the front he found means of staying away.

Meanwhile the British submarine campaign was causing a shortage of ammunition, which was almost as acute as it was with the Allies. ‘It was fortunate for us,’ Liman wrote,
‘that the British attacks never lasted more than one day, and were punctuated by pauses of several days. Otherwise it would have been impossible to replenish our artillery ammunition.’
He speaks too of ‘the jealousy and lack of co-operation so common among Turkish general officers’, and of several changes in the high command which had to be made at this time as a
result of their heavy losses.

None of this was more than guessed at in Hamilton’s headquarters. It was known, however, from prisoners, from aerial reconnaissance and from agents in Constantinople, that Turkish
reinforcements in large numbers were arriving on the peninsula, though whether for attack or simply to make good their losses it was impossible to say. As July ran out both sides settled down to an
erratic apprehensive calm, enduring the same blistering sun, the same plague of flies and infected dust, the same ant-like existence in the ground. The Allies waited for the Turks to issue forth
from the hills; the Turks waited for the Allies to come up to meet them. It was all very old and very new, a twentieth-century revival of the interminable siege. The Turks had a trench and a
machine-gun post among Schliemann’s excavations on the site of Troy.