Leon Uris (41 page)

As the Anzac convoy sweltered northward toward the Red Sea, a second convoy from England sweltered southward through the Straits of Gibraltar for a rendezvous in Egypt.

The British home armada carried forward echelons of a pair of veteran army divisions and a host of attached elements to establish a large permanent base camp and training facility.

Berthed on several of the southbound warships was a cadre of two hundred regular British officers to take over the Anzac units, bringing them up to strength and assuring British control.

Major General Sir Llewelyn Brodhead and his staff sailed aboard the cruiser, HMS
Foxhampton.
He set up a secure command center where he spent most of the day and half of the night.

Brodhead had expressed his concerns on a military venture he was not completely in tune with. Once the War Council made the decision, he got aboard in a positive manner, as one might expect of a fine field commander. When they passed Gibraltar he began briefing his senior officers on a need to know basis and made his presentation with very much of a can-do attitude.

Yet, can there be a man lonelier than one of high rank about to embark on a venture he held grave doubts about and who had to hold these doubts within himself?

Before the battle there was so damned much to be done. Brodhead would be assuming command of tens of thousands of untamed raw colonials. He and his officers had to get them into combat shape in three to four months. Beastly short time, that. Training would be a merciless grind, worsened by the heat.

The trick here was to gain confidence. These Anzacs were apt to grow to hate their British overseers. Building a spirit of the corps was as important as their fighting skills.

If Sir Llewelyn had a soft spot, a sentimental button, it was Ulster. He intensely disliked what he was about to lay on young Major Hubble, but Hubble was his hand-picked gamble. Although Chris had a modest rank, the General felt close and at ease with his junior confidant, and he would most likely open up and tell more to impress Hubble with the importance of his mission.

“Sir! Major Hubble!” the General’s botsman ripped off.

“Yes, show him in. No interruptions of any sort unless it’s from Fleet Command.”

“Sir!”

“Major Hubble, at your service!” Chris said, flashing a smart salute. The two were locked in with a clang. Chris’s heart was a-thump. No one with the lowly rank of major had been privy to the command room. The whir of a powerful overhead fan and the sucking out of dead air was heard as Brodhead looked up with the eyes of a sorrowful bloodhound.

“Sit easy, Chris. Stop me for questions as you wish and prepare yourself for a real boot in the ass.”

Chris laid his crop and hat aside and followed the General’s lead in loosening his Sam Browne belt and field scarf.

“We’re in top secret country now,” the General began.

“Yes, sir.”

Brodhead stood and rolled down a map like a large window shade, showing the eastern Mediterranean and bordering environs.

“It’s a bang-on proposition, Chris. The Turks have closed the Dardanelles Straits and we have to open them. It is a brilliant concept designed to knock the Turks out of the war with a single blow and move up the Danube Valley to split the Germans in half. However, and I’m going to fill you up with howevers, it is more of a political decision than a military decision. Winston Churchill is its most forceful advocate.”

Brodhead picked one of his pipes off the desk to use as a pointer. “This is it. This cock of land dangling into the Mediterranean. The Gallipoli Peninsula, forty miles long and varying in width up to four to ten miles. The Dardanelles Straits run along the eastern side into the Sea of Marmara, Constantinople, and the Black Sea. On the western side of the peninsula is the Aegean Sea.”

Chris nearly shivered with excitement. Rumors and being a small man in a large staff are one thing. But to sit before a general and become a part of it was an ethereal experience.

“The Gallipoli Peninsula is a wild place, sparsely inhabited, with primitive trails, sheer cliffs, mountains, deep valleys. It is filled with caves and ravines and ridge tops and gorges that can house hundreds of machine-gun nests, mines, and barbed wire. But these fellows up here,” he said, tapping a series of hilltop positions, “are the key. Turks have forts with coastal guns capable of shooting down onto both sides.”

“Yes, sir,” Chris said in a whisper.

“It is also a political and not a military decision for us not to ally yourselves with the armies of the Balkan union. The thinking is that the Serbs, Bosnians, and Bulgarians re too unstable politically and too volatile to be dependable I personally would like to see the Greeks drive across Thrace, but our Russian ally objects to that.

“What this means is,” Brodhead went on, “it will be a British show with some French support. Churchill argues that we have an abundance of naval power to subject
Gallipoli to the most devastating bombardment in history. Frankly, I expect that Churchill thinks he is going to sink the peninsula…. Questions up to now?”

“Yes, sir. This naval assault. I take it, it must knock out the Turkish hilltop forts and otherwise disrupt and disorient the other Turkish positions so they will be soft objectives later on.”

“That’s the thinking.”

“You have reservations, sir?”

How much to confide, Brodhead pondered. “Yes,” he said. “Naval guns fire in a flat trajectory. They are meant to hit other warships riding above the water. Will they be that effective against dug-in land positions? Damned fact is, nobody knows! Never been done! There are other parts of this operation that have never been done, namely, the landing and supplying from the sea of an army of this size. Never been done!

“Now,” he went on, “come some other intangibles. What if we don’t force the Dardanelles open? That means we will not be able to land on the eastern side of the peninsula. We will have to land from the Aegean side with very little beach, and immediately fight uphill.”

The room, so splendid in its mythology a few moments earlier, now began to appear as a deadly vault to Chris.

“The plan is one, two, three,” General Brodhead went on. “The French land on the opposite side of the straits in Anatolia—ancient Troy, as a matter of fact. They secure a perimeter, and hold. The Turks haven’t much to send against them, nor do the French have to drive inland…just hold their side of the Dardanelles.

“The main British force will land on the tip of Gallipoli here at Cape Helles and drive up the peninsula. Their first major objective will be the hilltop of Achi Baba, about six miles upland.

“We,” Brodhead said deliberately, “have very little room for deception. The navy will be pounding them for weeks so they’ll know we’re coming. The Anzacs will land farther
up the peninsula, take Chunuk Bair hilltop, and cut off the entire place from Turkish reinforcements and eventually be joined by the British driving up to meet us.”

“Would it be fair to say,” Chris interrupted, “that the Turks have shown very little against the Balkan union and the Italians in Africa?”

“The grand scheme is that our navy clears the Dardanelles Straits, steams up to Constantinople, and opens a naval bombardment while we drive up and lay siege.”

Suddenly Brodhead’s eyes watered and he leaned over the desk and planted his fists in a manner that Chris had come to understand as the man’s dead serious mode.

“IF the navy does not clean out the straits…IF the Turks are properly commanded by a German staff and their high ground is intact…IF we are forced to land on the Aegean side and start straight uphill…IF the Turks can force us into a stagnant situation, we may be fucked four ways from Sunday. God help you if what I said ever leaves this room.”

Chris pleaded with himself not to turn pale and faint before the General, yet he knew that his legs would not hold him at that moment. Brodhead broke into a sweat of his own and felt like a naughty boy for betraying his doubts to a junior officer.

“What do you need me to do, sir?” Christ asked stoutly. Then, as an afterthought, he said, “One would suppose there will be no cavalry involved?”

Brodhead was relieved to be able to crack a smile followed by a laugh. He drummed his fingers on the table. Well, here is what you’ve been waiting for, lad. Transport, m the event we are stalemated and hung up on the wrong side of the hills.”

“I see,” Chris said, realizing the enormity of it.

“The French have a relatively easy supply situation requiring no special transport capacity. Now, with the main British force down here at the tip of Cape Helles, there is a fluid front and difficult terrain to negotiate.”

Chris nodded.

“There are Jews in Palestine, you know…pioneers reclaiming land, that sort of thing. Life has been made difficult for them by the Ottomans. When the war started the Turks rounded up many of the men and inflicted rather nasty punishment on them, claiming they were British spies and sympathizers. A large number of them, several hundred, escaped to Egypt and petitioned to form a unit of the British Army. It was decided, for political reasons, not to have them officially in the army per se but to allow them to form a unit we will use for transport at Cape Helles. The Zion Mule Corps.”

“I say,” Chris said.

“When I went over preliminary plans back at the War Office, a mule unit was the only way to go with my Anzacs. Damnedest thing, Chris, we discovered that neither New Zealand nor Australia knows anything about mules. Never had them in either place, can you imagine?”

Chris looked as though he was going to burst into tears.

“Bang on, Chris. If the attack stalls and we have to go to the trenches, we are doomed without mule transport. There is no other way we can get food, ammunition, water, and medical supplies up the mountainside, and there is no way we can remove our wounded. What I told you back at Camp Bushy is the absolute truth. We are doomed without mules, should the battle go wrong. From this moment, the Seventh New Zealand Light Horse is the mule transportation battalion for the Anzacs. You must build it from the ground up. I will give you every priority within my power. Do this, and I repeat my promise, you’ll jump directly to colonel at the end of the campaign…you have my word…. Well?”

“Mules,” Chris said, “rather degrading, sir.”

“So is war,” Brodhead answered.

The mail boat made a welcome round of the convoy at Gibraltar and, as they got under way again, the officers and men were given a fill of letters to be read and read again until the words themselves grew war-weary.

Jeremy reached his quarters and saw a packet of letters on the small ship’s desk. He thumbed the envelopes, stopped on one that caught his eye, and opened it.

Jeremy opened the lid of his chest and took out the bundle of letters that lay on the top, tied with a ribbon and softly scented of his mother’s perfume. He had agonized for the courage to take the moment to answer her. The time had come.