Gallipoli (44 page)

Then on September 2 a message arrived at Imbros saying that everything was changed. The French had suddenly and quite unpredictably come forward with an offer to send out a new army to
the Dardanelles under the command of General Sarrail. Four French divisions were to be embarked at Marseilles to join the two already at Cape Helles, and they were to be landed on the
Asiatic side. The British government would replace the French taken from Cape Helles with two fresh divisions of their own. Hamilton could scarcely believe it when he read the cable. ‘From
bankrupt to millionaire in twenty-four hours,’ he wrote. ‘The enormous spin of fortune’s wheel makes me giddy.’ Now they were bound to get through; the Turks had had the go
knocked out of them already and this new attack in Asia would be the finish. He himself would offer to serve under Sarrail if that would help to buttress this wonderful piece of news.

The appointment of Sarrail was a devious affair with roots reaching back as far as the Dreyfus case. Sarrail, a Radical-Socialist, an anti-cleric, had been relieved of his command at Verdun by
Joffre, but he was politically strong enough to force the French government to find him another appointment. And so he was to have this new independent command in the Near East. Joffre was not in a
position to block the appointment, but he could delay and weaken it, and this he was already doing by the time Hamilton got his cable. The four French divisions, he insisted, were not to go to the
Dardanelles until after the September offensive had been fought on the western front.

Hamilton got this news on September 14. The earliest date on which the new soldiers could arrive, Kitchener now told him, was mid-November. ‘Postponed!’ the entry runs in
Hamilton’s diary. ‘The word is like a knell.’ There was worse to follow.

In the last week of September Bulgaria mobilized, and it was apparent that within a matter of days she would be marching with the Germans and Austrians against Serbia. There was only one way of
bringing help to the Serbians, and that was by attacking Bulgaria through Greece. But the Greek government was now insisting that if she was to enter the war she must be supported by an Allied
force at Salonika. There was not much time. Kitchener and Joffre agreed that two divisions, one French and the other British, must be sent from Gallipoli to Salonika at once. If necessary
Hamilton would have to abandon Suvla and again confine himself to the bridgeheads at Anzac and Cape Helles.

This blow fell on Imbros on September 26, and Hamilton forced himself to take it philosophically. He wrote in his diary early in October, ‘At whose door will history leave the blame for
the helpless, hopeless fix we are left in—rotting with disease and told to take it easy.’ But he loyally sent off the two divisions to Salonika and fitted them out as well as he could
before they left.

By now, however, events had come to a crisis where two divisions could make little difference one way or another. Joffre’s offensive in the west failed with the loss of a quarter of a
million men. Then on October 9 the Germans and Austrians fell on Belgrade, while on the following day the Bulgarians attacked Serbia from the east. The Allies’ force at Salonika was too
small, too disorganized and too far away to do anything but to look on helplessly. And it was one more galling twist that the removal of the two divisions from Gallipoli had precisely the reverse
effect on Greece to the one anticipated. Seeing Hamilton’s army reduced like this, King Constantine at once made up his mind that the Allies were about to abandon Gallipoli. He dismissed his
anti-German Prime Minister, Venizelos, and decided upon a neutrality which, if not actively hostile to the Allies, was at least not helpful.

There was but one ray of hope for Gallipoli in all this. Keyes wanted the Fleet to assault the Narrows again. He had argued for it after the August battles had failed, he argued all through
September, and with a new ally—Admiral Wemyss, the Commander-in-Chief at Lemnos—he was still arguing in October. De Robeck was still opposed but he allowed Keyes to draw up a new plan
and propound it to a group of senior admirals at the Dardanelles. They were caught again in the old half-emotional dilemma. They felt deeply about the losses of the Army, they wanted to attack, and
they again half believed that in the end the Admiralty would order them to do so. But still they could not clearly see how it was to be done. Eventually a compromise was decided upon: Keyes was to
go to London and put the matter personally to the Admiralty and the War Cabinet.

But this for the moment was a side-issue, a single current moving against a turning tide. After the September offensive Joffre still withheld the four divisions earmarked
for the Dardanelles, and the longer he delayed the more French opinion began to swing against the Asiatic landing altogether. With Serbia falling, Salonika appeared to be the more crucial strategic
point for a new offensive. In London, too, Lloyd George and Carson,
²⁸
the Attorney-General, were openly pushing their campaign against Kitchener, and the
issue was rapidly narrowing down to a simple alternative: Salonika or Gallipoli, which was it to be? Hamilton’s army was now down to half its strength and the campaign was at a stalemate. Was
it really worth while throwing good money after bad?

On October 11 Kitchener felt bound to acknowledge the pressure of these questions. He cabled Hamilton, ‘What is your estimate of the probable losses which would be entailed to your force
if the evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula was decided upon and carried out in the most careful manner? No decision has been arrived at yet on this question of evacuation, but I feel I ought to
have your views.’

When he read this Hamilton burst out, ‘If they do this they make the Dardanelles into the bloodiest tragedy of the world . . I won’t touch it.’ Could they not understand that
the Turks were worn out, that the Allied soldiers were reviving now in the cooler weather, that they had only to be supported at Gallipoli and they would get through? And what if a gale came up
half way through the evacuation? It might cause a disaster only equalled in history by that of the Athenians at Syracuse.

The headquarters at Imbros was not the best of places in which to take calm decisions. Hamilton was suffering miserably from dysentery, and German aircraft had begun to raid the island. On this
very day a quiverful of iron spikes had come rattling down about the General’s head.

In the morning, however, he sent off a sober reply. They must reckon on the loss of half the men, and all their guns and stores, he said. ‘One quarter would probably
get off quite easily, then the trouble would begin. We might be very lucky and lose considerably less than I have estimated. On the other hand, with all these raw troops at Suvla and all these
Senegalese at Cape Helles, we might have a veritable catastrophe.’

Privately Hamilton believed that the losses would be less than half—between 35 and 45 per cent. was his estimate—but his staff were in favour of the higher figure, and he adopted it
to make his opposition to the evacuation absolutely clear. But there was more in Kitchener’s query than a balancing of estimates about evacuation: the whole question of Hamilton’s
command was involved. Already there had been rumblings. On October 4 Kitchener had sent a private cable to Hamilton warning him that there had been a ‘flow of unofficial reports from
Gallipoli’ adversely criticizing G.H.Q. at Imbros. Should they not make some changes, Kitchener suggested. Perhaps Braithwaite should come home.

Hamilton had indignantly refused. But it was clear now that he himself and everyone on Imbros were under fire.

Then on October 11, the same day that Kitchener had sent his cable about evacuation, the Dardanelles Committee approached the matter in an oblique but very definite way. They decided that
reinforcements should be dispatched to the Near East, but they were not to go directly to Gallipoli; they were to be held in Egypt while a senior general, Haig or Kitchener himself—someone at
any rate who was senior to Hamilton—went out and decided between Gallipoli and Salonika.

The truth was that Hamilton was diminishing fast in everybody’s estimation. He was the general who always nearly succeeded. He had badly mismanaged Suvla, and General Stopford, who had
recently come home, was making some very serious charges about the interference of G.H.Q. in the battle. The headquarters staff, Stopford wrote in a report to the War Office, ‘lived on an
island at some distance from the peninsula’ and had been greatly misinformed about the Turkish strength at Suvla. There
was another factor. Hamilton was
Kitchener’s man, and it was beginning to seem that Kitchener might be covering him up. The Committee waited now with some impatience to see whether anything hopeful or useful would come in
reply to Kitchener’s cable. It chanced, too, that just at this time the German zeppelins were having a particular success in their raids on London: 176 people had been killed in two
successive nights. Between the falling bombs on London and the falling spikes on Imbros everybody’s nerves were on edge.

But it was not the bombs, nor Stopford’s criticisms, not even the growing opposition to Kitchener and all his plans and protégés which was the immediate factor in the undoing
of Hamilton’s reputation at this moment. It was an Australian journalist named Keith Murdoch. His entry into the explosive scene is one of the oddest incidents in the Gallipoli campaign.

The trouble had begun far back in April with Ashmead-Bartlett, the war correspondent who represented the London press at the Dardanelles. According to Compton Mackenzie, who was in a position to
know, Ashmead-Bartlett was not liked at headquarters. He was the stranger in the camp, a solitary civilian among professional and amateur soldiers. He was never captivated by Hamilton as the others
were, but remained instead the detached hostile critic. He resented the censorship at G.H.Q., he disagreed with all their plans, and, worst of all, he was for ever predicting failure. Things grew
to such a pitch that on one occasion, according to Mackenzie, the officers at Corps Headquarters at Cape Helles went into hiding in the rocks when Ashmead-Bartlett approached to avoid having to ask
him to lunch.

Despite its self-imposed discomfort and its devotion, Imbros was not a very inspiring place for an outsider. Of necessity it was a club. There was a disguised but inescapable atmosphere of
privilege, of the old school and the old regiment, of breeding and manners. Hamilton found some of the most devoted of his admirers among the many young men of good family who as civilians had
joined his staff. To strangers they sometimes conveyed an impression of superiority and complacency, and their good humour and
politeness were often mistaken for
dilettantism. No one questioned their courage; from Hamilton downwards senior officers made a point of deliberately and nonchalantly exposing themselves to enemy fire when they were at the front.
Still, there was something lacking: a toughness, a roughness, the reassurance of the common touch. Among the troops it was rumoured that Hamilton wrote poetry in his spare time, and he was supposed
to be very much under Braithwaite’s thumb. His charm, his integrity and his subtle intelligence were recognized by those who met him, but somehow these qualities did not work at a
distance—and the soldiers were always at a distance. In brief, he seemed soft.

It was against these things that Ashmead-Bartlett, burning with his own ideas, waged his private war. Hamilton’s outward attitude to him was polite and helpful, but he felt privately that
Ashmead-Bartlett had too much power and that his depressing attitude was damaging the expedition. Ashmead-Bartlett’s persistent theme was that the Army should have landed at Bulair, and with
this Hamilton did not agree. Nor was he very encouraging when Ashmead-Bartlett came to him one day with the suggestion that the Turkish soldiers in the trenches should be induced to desert by the
offer of ten shillings and a free pardon. ‘This makes one wonder,’ Hamilton wrote after the interview, ‘what would Ashmead-Bartlett himself do if he were offered ten shillings and
a good supper by a Mahommedan when he was feeling a bit hungry and hard-up among the Christians.’ In May, when Ashmead-Bartlett went home on leave, Hamilton appointed Mackenzie to fill his
place and tried to make the arrangement permanent, but neither Mackenzie nor the authorities in London were enthusiastic. Ashmead-Bartlett came back and was more glum and despondent than ever.

Mackenzie’s description of him at their first meeting is of ‘a slim man in khaki with a soft felt hat the colour of verdigris, a camera slung around his shoulders, and an unrelaxing
expression of nervous exasperation.’

He ‘walked along the deck with the air of one convinced that his presence there annoyed everybody, and that we all wanted a
jolly good dose of physic. Presently he
came away from an interview with Sir Ian Hamilton, looking the way Cassandra must have often looked some three thousand years before. After telling me that the whole expedition was doomed to
failure, and that he expected to be torpedoed aboard the
Majestic
(in which he was about to sail) he left the ship.’

Yet the really irritating thing about Ashmead-Bartlett was that he was so often right. He
was
torpedoed aboard the
Majestic
that same night. And there was indeed a great deal
to criticize in the generals’ plans since they so frequently did end in disaster. Moreover, he could not be ignored. In London he had the ear of a number of important people in the cabinet,
and however much he was disliked on Imbros the soldiers at the front were glad enough to see him, and he was often at the front. As a war correspondent, Ashmead-Bartlett was extremely capable.

He was still with the expedition and more exasperated than ever when at the conclusion of the August battles Murdoch arrived.

Murdoch was not really a war correspondent at all. He was on his way to London to act as the representative of various Australian newspapers there, and had been given a temporary official
mission by his government to call in at Egypt and report upon the postal arrangements for the Australian troops. He was carrying letters of introduction from the Australian Prime Minister, Andrew
Fisher, and the Australian Minister for Defence, Senator Pearce.