Gallipoli (52 page)

On January 20, 1918, the
Goeben
emerged at last. Shortly before dawn she came out of the straits with the
Breslau
and headed through the Ægean towards Imbros. For two
years a British flotilla had been waiting there for just this opportunity, but it chanced that the
Lord Nelson
and the
Agamemnon
, the only two ships which were capable of sinking
the
Goeben
, were away at Salonika that day; and so it was left to a group of destroyers and
monitors to engage. They had very little chance. The monitor
Raglan
and another British ship soon went down, and for the Germans it might have been a supremely successful day had they not run on to a minefield off Imbros. The
Breslau
sank
instantly, and the
Goeben
with a hole in her side struggled back to the Narrows where she beached herself. The vessel was repeatedly attacked from the air during the next few days, but she
managed to right herself and escaped to Constantinople. Under the name of
Yavus
she is still serving with the Turkish Fleet.

Had the war continued into 1919 the British Fleet would have made another attempt to force the Dardanelles. In 1918 Admiral Wemyss had been installed as First Sea Lord, and Keyes was in command
of the Dover Patrol. They had obtained the cabinet’s consent to the new assault, and were actually engaged in assembling the ships when they were forestalled by the Armistice. It was signed
with the Turks in the harbour of Mudros on October 30, 1918, twelve days before the cessation of hostilities in France. A fortnight later an Allied flotilla steamed up the Dardanelles, a long grey
line of silent ships watched silently by the Turkish gunners on the cliffs, and an occupation force was put ashore.

Talaat and Enver did not wait for the end. Shortly before the Armistice they were ousted by a provisional government, and while all the waterfront at Constantinople was hung with Greek flags in
expectation of the arrival of the Allied Fleet they fled to Germany. Talaat made his home under another name in Berlin, and from there in 1921 he sent a message to Aubrey Herbert in England
suggesting that they should meet. The rendezvous took place at Hamm in Germany, and Talaat proposed an Anglo-Turkish alliance. He agreed that he had made mistakes—that the Young Turks should
never have joined the Germans—but that, he said, was past and done with; the important thing was that Britain was losing everything she had gained in Turkey by failing to come to an agreement
with Mustafa Kemal.

The two men talked at great length, and it did not seem to Herbert that Talaat, even in these circumstances when his voice could only be a voice in a void, was absurd or even particularly
pathetic. He was thinner and he was obviously poor, but the shrewdness remained, the hardness and the subtlety. Herbert said he could do no more than report to the Foreign
Office, and Talaat went off in the Berlin train.

Talaat was wrong in one important aspect of his argument, for the past was not nearly done with yet. A few days later he felt a tap on his shoulder as he was walking in the street in Berlin, and
turning round he saw the strained white face of a young Armenian student. This boy, Solomon Telririam by name, was in that instant the apotheosis of the ruined Armenian race. As a child he had seen
his father stripped and murdered by the Turks, his mother and sisters put on the road for the Mesopotamian desert only to be raped and butchered by their guards. Someone had picked him up
unconscious from the ground, and somehow he had made his way through Russia to Berlin. There, he said later, he had a vision: his mother was standing over him saying, ‘You know Talaat is
here. But you seem quite heartless and are not my son.’ And now in the street, having looked for a second into the gypsy face, the boy took a revolver from his pocket and blew out
Talaat’s brains.

Both Liman, who was now living in retirement in Germany, and Talaat’s widow gave evidence at the trial—Liman to defend the reputation of himself and the German soldiers who were in
Turkey at the time of the Armenian massacres, and the widow to plead for her husband’s name. Yet no one had the ghost of a chance of exonerating Talaat on this issue. One of the telegrams
sent to a provincial Turkish commander was read in court. The officer had asked for the name of the place to which he was to send the Armenians whom he had rounded up. Talaat replied, ‘The
place where they are being sent to is nowhere.’

Enver too had set out for Germany at the collapse in 1918, and soon after he was gone he was condemned to death in Constantinople. He made his way across the Black Sea to Odessa, and thence
overland through the chaos of the Balkans to Berlin. He soon grew tired of the wretched life of a refugee in a defeated capital, and in 1919 he returned to Russia to try his fortune with
the Soviets. For a while he was with General Denikin in the struggle for the independence of the Caucasus, but when Denikin negotiated with the Allies he went to Azerbaijan. During
1920 and 1921 he was employed at Moscow as the director of the Asiatic department of the Soviet government, and he attended a conference at Baku as the leader of the communist movement in the
Middle East. From this point on the story grows obscure; he was constantly reported dead only to appear again. In the end, however, it appears that he turned against the Russians, and he is said to
have met his death leading a cavalry charge against them in the mountains of Russian Turkestan in 1922. He was then in his early forties.

Liman remained in command of the Turkish Army on the southern front in Syria until he was defeated by Allenby in 1918, when he handed over the command to Kemal and returned to Constantinople.
There he surrendered to the Allies, and was interned in Malta until the summer of 1919. In the ten years that were left to him (he was already sixty at Gallipoli), he enjoyed a dignified and
respected retirement, and the private rages which, one feels, lie just below the surface in such a controlled character were his own affair. He died a few years before Hitler came to power and left
a name as a military strategist which was hardly less admired in Britain than it was in Germany.

Of Kemal’s own fabulous rise to power there are of course very full accounts, but perhaps his first triumphs at the Dardanelles were as important to him as any others. When towards the end
of the campaign he arrived in Constantinople ill and exhausted not even Enver’s opposition could prevent the Turkish newspapers from greeting him as ‘The Saviour of
Gallipoli’.

In August 1916 a Royal Commission was set up in London to investigate the Gallipoli campaign. General Monro, who was then on his way to India to become Commander-in-Chief, was
the first witness, and in the ensuing year nearly 200 others were called to give evidence: Churchill and Hamilton, de Robeck and Keyes,
Stopford and Fisher, all the generals
and admirals, and finally the War correspondents, Nevinson, Ashmead-Bartlett and Murdoch. Kitchener, who by then was dead,
³⁹
was the only major figure who
did not put his case. At the end of 1917 the Commission’s report came out, and it stated its general conclusions very clearly: ‘ . . . from the outset the risks of failure attending the
enterprise outweighed its chances of success.’ General Monro was congratulated upon the evacuation: it was, the Commission said, ‘a wise and courageous decision.’

Dealing with the Suvla landing, the Commissioners expressed the view that General Stopford might have kept in closer touch with his troops, but Hamilton, they thought, had only increased his
difficulties by intervening on August 8. ‘We regard the intervention,’ the report stated, ‘as well-intentioned but injudicious.’ In short, the general conclusion was that
the campaign was a mistake, and that even with better luck and better management, it could hardly have succeeded.

In 1917 the Dardanelles Commissioners were not ideally placed for taking an historical view of the campaign, for there was then still another year of trench warfare to be fought in France, and
the Russian revolution had not yet taken its full effect; and so it may not have been altogether apparent then that there were worse things in the world than the loss of half a dozen old
battleships in the Dardanelles, or the weakening of the French front by a few extra divisions which might have made all the difference at Gallipoli.

It was apparent only that the Allies had been incomparably the losers. During the 259 days that elapsed between the first landings in April 1915 and the final withdrawal in January 1916 they
sent half a million men to Gallipoli, and slightly more than half of these became casualties. There is some doubt about the exact number of the Turkish losses, but they are officially computed at
251,000, which is just one thousand less than those suffered by the
Allies; and this perhaps is the best indication of how closely the struggle was fought.
⁴⁰

As for the strategic consequences of the defeat, they scarcely bore thinking about. Twenty Turkish divisions were set free to attack Russia and to threaten Egypt. All contact with Russia and
Rumania was lost, and the war dragged on in the Near East for another three years while another Allied army, infinitely greater in size than the one employed at Gallipoli, slowly and painfully made
good the ground that had been lost. Before the Ottoman Empire fell in 1918 nearly three-quarters of a million Allied soldiers were sent to Salonika, and another 280,000 fought their way northwards
across the desert from Egypt to Jerusalem and Damascus. Except for the Anzac troops none of the men who were evacuated from Gallipoli were ever employed against the Germans as General Monro had
hoped they would be; they remained in the East until the end of the war.

The campaign had been a mighty destroyer of reputations. When Kitchener returned to England at the end of 1915 he was forced to reinstate the General Staff in the War Office, and he was no
longer a semi-dictatorial figure in the cabinet. He was sixty-five, Gallipoli seemed to have deprived him of his old oracular powers of taking decisions, and Lloyd George, Bonar Law and others
began a concerted move to get him out. At his death six months later his influence was rapidly falling away. In the years
that followed it was demonstrated over and over
again in many books that the sinking of the
Hampshire
had saved Kitchener from a sad and inevitable decline. Yet he was so revered by the public in England that for a long time people
simply could not bring themselves to believe that he was dead, and there was a persistent rumour that he was a prisoner of the Germans.

And still the aura persists, his name still rises above that of any other British general in the first world war, and it is not clear that these others managed any better than he would have done
had he lived and remained in office. He delayed and vacillated over Gallipoli, and in the end it was his undoing; yet he understood the campaign with a better strategical sense than most of his
contemporaries, and for a time at least—that time when he persuaded the British and the French Governments to give priority to Gallipoli—he had the courage of his imagination.

It was the same with Churchill, except that in his case he lived on and had to fight his way back. It was not until 1917 that Lloyd George, the new Prime Minister, felt that he was able to bring
him into the Government again as Minister of Munitions, and even then there was much opposition to it. As late as the general election of 1923 there were cries of ‘What about the
Dardanelles?’ whenever he addressed a public meeting. That was the year when the Lloyd George coalition fell, and Churchill was defeated in the election—his first defeat since he had
entered the House of Commons nearly a quarter of a century before. His eclipse seemed to be complete. In a study of the Gallipoli campaign an American staff officer wrote, ‘It is doubtful if
even Great Britain could survive another world war and another Churchill.’ And the Australian Official History which appeared about this time contained these words: ‘So through a
Churchill’s lack of imagination, a layman’s ignorance of artillery, and the fatal power of a young enthusiasm to convince older and slower brains, the tragedy of Gallipoli was
born.’ Somewhere in the painful fields of memory the ghost of Fisher was still repeating, ‘Damn the Dardanelles. They will be our grave.’

Then in the nineteen-twenties the reaction began to set in. The
first surprise came from the Turkish General Staff when they admitted that on March 19, 1915, nearly all
their ammunition at the Narrows had been shot away, and that a renewed attack on that day might very well have been decisive. The whole conception of the naval attack was now seen, if not in a new
light, in a more controversial way. Other evidence followed—evidence of the extreme political tension in Constantinople at that time, and of the fact that Turkey possessed only two arsenals
which the Allied Fleet might easily have destroyed.

In its report the Turkish staff stated: ‘A naval attack executed with rapidity and vigour at the outbreak of the war might have been successful . . . if the Entente Fleets had appeared
before Constantinople the eight divisions retained there would have been impotent to defend it.’ And so that first and much derided directive: ‘The Admiralty should prepare for a naval
expedition in February to bombard and take the Gallipoli peninsula with Constantinople as its objective,’ was not so fanciful after all.

Roger Keyes, not surprisingly, needed very little persuading about the importance of these revelations. In 1925, when he was in command of the Mediterranean Fleet, he steamed through the
Dardanelles and, according to Aspinall, who was with him, he could hardly speak for emotion. ‘My God,’ he said at last, ‘it would have been even easier than I thought; we simply
couldn’t
have failed . . . and because we didn’t try, another million lives were thrown away and the war went on for another three years.’

Other experts—and they were still in a majority—remained unconvinced. Yet no one could altogether ignore the admission of Liman von Sanders and the Turkish commanders that more than
once the divisional generals at Cape Helles had wanted to withdraw behind Achi Baba; that on at least two occasions, at the original landing at Anzac in April and again at Suvla in August, the
Allies were on the very edge of breaking through and were only prevented from doing so by the intervention of Mustafa Kemal.