Gallipoli

CHAPTER SEVEN

A STRANGE light plays over the Gallipoli landing on April 25, and no matter how often the story is retold there is still an actuality about it, a feeling of suspense and incompleteness. Although nearly half a century has gone by, nothing yet seems fated about the day’s events, a hundred questions remain unanswered, and in a curious way one feels that the battle might still lie before us in the future; that there is still time to make other plans and bring it to a different ending.

Hardly anyone behaves on this day as you might have expected him to do. One can think of half a dozen moves that the commanders might have made at any given moment, and very often the thing they did do seems the most improbable of all. There is a certain clarity about the actions of Mustafa Kemal on the Turkish side, and of Roger Keyes with the British, but for the others — and perhaps at times for these two as well — the great crises of the day appear to have gone cascading by as though they were some natural phenomenon, having a monstrous life of its own, and for the time being entirely out of control.

For the soldiers in the front line the issues were, of course, brutally simple, but even here the most implausible situations develop; having captured some vital position a kind of inertia seizes both officers and men. Fatigue overwhelms them and they can think of nothing but retreat. Confronted by some quite impossible objective their lives suddenly appear to them to be of no consequence at all; they get up and charge and die. Thus vacuums occur all along the line; while all is peace and quiet in one valley a frightful carnage rages in the next; and this for no apparent reason, unless it be that men are always a little mad in battle and fear and courage combine at last to paralyse the mind.

Even the natural elements — the unexpected currents in the sea, the unmapped countryside, the sudden changes in the weather — have a certain eccentricity at Gallipoli. When for an instant the battle composes itself into a coherent pattern all is upset by some chance shifting of the wind, some stray cloud passing over the moon.

And so no programme goes according to plan, never at any moment through the long day can you predict what will happen next. Often it is perfectly clear to the observer that victory is but a hairsbreadth away — just one more move, just this or that — but the move is never made, and instead, like a spectator at a Shakespearean drama, one is hurried off to some other crisis in another part of the forest.

The movements of both the commanders-in-chief were very strange. Instead of putting himself aboard some fast detached command vessel like the Phaeton, with adequate signalling equipment, Hamilton chose to immure himself in the conning tower of the Queen Elizabeth, and thereby he cut himself off both from his staff and from direct command of what was happening on shore. The Queen Elizabeth was a fighting ship with her own duties to perform quite independently of the commander-in-chief, and although she was able to cruise up and down the coast at the General’s will, she could never get near enough to the beaches for him to understand what was going on; and the firing of her huge guns can scarcely have been conducive to clear thinking. Hamilton, in any case, had resolved before ever the battle began not to interfere unless he was asked — all tactical authority was handed over to his two corps commanders, Hunter-Weston with the British on the Cape Helles front, and Birdwood with the Anzac forces at Gaba Tepe. Since these two officers also remained at sea through the vital hours of the day they too were without accurate information. Signalling arrangements on the shore began to fail as soon as the first contact with the enemy was made, and very soon each separate unit was left to its own devices. Thus no senior commander had any clear picture of the battle, and battalions divided by only a mile or two from the main front might just as well have been fighting on the moon for all the control the commanders exercised upon them.

On several occasions Hamilton might have committed a mobile reserve of troops with the most telling consequences, but it never occurred to him to do this without his subordinates’ approval, those same subordinates who were almost as much in ignorance as he was, and in no position to approve or disapprove of anything. And so all day the commander-in-chief cruises up and down the coast in his huge battleship. He hesitates, he communes with himself, he waits; and it is not until late that night that, suddenly and courageously, he intervenes with a resolute decision.

Liman von Sanders’ actions on April 25 were more understandable but hardly more inspired. He was at his headquarters in the town of Gallipoli when, at 5 a.m., he was woken with the news that the Allies had landed. There were, he says, many pale faces around him as the reports came in. The first of these reports arrived from Besika Bay, south of Kum Kale in Asia: a squadron of enemy warships was approaching the coast there with the apparent intention of putting a force ashore. This was quickly followed by news of the actual landing of the French at Kum Kale, and of heavy fighting on the peninsula, both at Cape Helles and near Gaba Tepe. Still another part of the Allied Fleet had steamed up into the Bay of Saros and had opened fire on the Bulair lines. Which of these five advances was the main attack?

Liman judged that it must be at Bulair. This was the point where he could be most seriously hit, and he felt bound to safeguard it until he knew more clearly which way the battle was going to go. Ordering the Seventh Division to march north from Gallipoli (that is to say away from the main battle) he himself with two adjutants galloped on ahead to the neck of the peninsula. While the early sun was still low on the horizon he drew rein on a high patch of ground near the Tomb of Suleiman the Magnificent and looked down on to Saros Bay. There he saw twenty Allied warships firing broadsides on the shore, with the shells of the Turkish batteries erupting in the sea around them. It was not possible to estimate how many soldiers the enemy had brought to this attack, because a high wall made of the branches of trees had been laid along the decks of the ships, but boats filled with men were already being lowered into the sea. They came on towards the beaches until the Turkish machine-gun fire thickened about them. Then they turned and retired out of range, as though they were waiting for reinforcements before renewing the assault.

Liman was studying this scene when Essad Pasha, one of his Turkish corps commanders, brought him the news that the troops in the toe of the peninsula, some forty miles away to the south-west, were being hard pressed and were urgently calling for reinforcements. Essad Pasha was ordered to proceed at once by sea to the Narrows and take command there. But Liman himself lingered on at Bulair. Even when Essad reported later in the day from Maidos that the battle in the south was growing critical, Liman still could not bring himself to believe that the landings near Gaba Tepe and Cape Helles were anything more than a diversion. However, he dispatched five battalions by sea from Gallipoli to the Narrows, while he himself remained behind in the north with his staff.

That night the fire from the enemy warships off Bulair died away, and when no further action followed in the morning Liman was persuaded at last that the real battle lay in the peninsula itself. He then took a major decision: the remainder of the two divisions at Bulair were ordered south, and he himself proceeded to Mal Tepe, near the Narrows, to take command.

Thus on both sides the opening phases of the battle were fought in the absence of the commanders-in-chief; each having made his plan stood back and left the issue to the soldiers in their awful collision on the shore.

The behaviour of the Turks is another part of the mystery. It is true that they were defending their own soil against a new Christian invasion from the west. They had their faith, and their priests were with them in the trenches inciting them to fight in the name of Allah and Mahomet. For many weeks they had been preparing for this day; they were rested and ready. But when all this is said, one still finds it difficult to understand their esprit de corps. For the most part they were illiterate conscripts from the country, and they fought simply because they were ordered to fight. Many of them had been without pay for months, they were poorly fed and badly looked after in every way; and the discipline was harsh.

One would have thought that these things would have been enough to have broken their spirit when the first dreadful barrage fell upon them from the sea. Yet, with one or two exceptions, the Turks fought with fantastic bravery on this day, and although they were always out-gunned and out-numbered their steadiness never forsook them. They were not in the least undisciplined in the way they fought; they were very cool and very skilful.

Nor is the conduct of the Allied soldiers very easily explained. Certainly they had the expedition feeling; they were young and consequently they believed that they could do anything. Yet very few of Hamilton’s troops had ever come under fire before or had ever killed a man or seen death around them. The midshipmen who took the boats to the shore were hardly more than children, and even the professional French and British soldiers had little conception of the nature of a modern battle, let alone so strange and perilous an operation as this. In the case of the Australians and New Zealanders there was not even a tradition to guide them, for there had been no wars at all in their country’s past. They had no immediate ancestors to live up to — it was simply a matter of proving themselves to themselves, of starting a tradition here and now.

The unknown, which is the real destroyer of courage, pressed more heavily on the Allies than the Turks, for these young men were a long way from their homes, most of them had lived much more protected lives than the Anatolian peasant, and now, at this first experience of war, they were the ones who had to get up into the open and expose themselves while the Turks remained in their safe and familiar trenches. Everything before the Allied soldiers was unknown: the dark sea, the waiting enemy, the very coast itself and all that lay beyond. And it was perhaps not very helpful that General Hunter-Weston should have made a proclamation to the 29th Division before the battle saying, ‘heavy losses by bullets, by shells, by mines and by drowning are to be expected.’ But none of this made any difference.

A wild exuberance seems to have seized upon everybody’s mind. The Australians rush ashore shouting ‘Imshi Yallah’, a phrase they had picked up in more careless days in Cairo. The sixteen-year-old British midshipman, standing up very straight at the tiller, grounds his boat on the sand, cries out some phrase from the football field, and such of his men who are still alive follow him ashore. The French doctor, operating in a ghastly welter of blood, makes a note in his diary, ‘I have sublime stretcher-bearers.’

They probably were sublime, for nearly everyone seems to have been possessed with an inhuman recklessness and selflessness on this day. On one beach alone no fewer than five Victoria Crosses were won within a few hours of the landing.

Still another decoration[11] was awarded to Lieut.-Commander Bernard Freyberg in circumstances which, though hardly typical of the fighting, do manage to convey perhaps as well as anything the curiously dedicated courage of the men. Freyberg, who was one of the party who had buried Rupert Brooke on Skyros two days before, came north with the Royal Naval Division, and as part of the pretended landing which was so successful in delaying Liman von Sanders at Bulair he was chosen to lead a boatload of soldiers ashore in the darkness. At the last moment, however, he pointed out that it was unwise to risk the lives of a whole platoon when one man would suffice. Accordingly he had himself taken towards the land in a naval cutter, and when the boat was still two miles from the coast he slipped naked into the icy midnight sea and swam ashore carrying on his back a waterproof canvas bag containing three oil flares and five calcium lights, a knife, a signalling light and a revolver. Reaching the beach after an hour and a half’s hard swimming, he lit his first flare, and then entering the water again swam on for another 300 yards to the east. Landing again he lit another flare and crept into some bushes to await developments. Nothing happened. He then crawled into the Turkish entrenchments, and finding no one about went back to the shore and ignited the third flare.

Freyberg’s chances of being picked up again in the expanse of black water in the bay were not very good, and by now he was suffering from cramp. But he loathed the idea of being made a prisoner of war; and so he went back into the sea and swam out into the darkness. He did not drown. When he was about half a mile from the shore the crew of the cutter caught sight of his brown oil-painted body in the waves. He was hauled on board and restored to life again.

Finally, among all these imponderables there remains the perplexing nature of the battlefield itself. Hamilton naturally made some effort to carry out a reconnaissance of the peninsula beforehand. Some of his senior officers had been taken up the coast in a destroyer to study the beaches and the cliffs, one or two of them had been flown over the scene; and there were Samson’s photographs. But none of these measures succeeded in conveying any real idea of the difficulties of the country, and the maps which were supplied to the officers were incomplete, if not downright inaccurate. In the case of the southern landing around Sedd-el-Bahr at Cape Helles there was at least some guidance to be had from the reports of the marines who had gone ashore during the naval bombardments in February and March. But the Gaba Tepe region, where the Anzac troops were to land, was unmapped and almost wholly unknown. It is still the most savage part of the whole peninsula.

From Chunuk Bair a hopeless maze of scrub-covered ridges drops almost sheer into the sea, and some of the ravines are so precipitous that nothing will grow upon their sides. There is no general He to the land; dried-up watercourses abruptly change direction and end in walls of gravel, each scarred crest leads on to another tangle of hills and formless valleys. Even with a map the eye quickly grows tired; by the very nature of their endless disparity the outlines dissolve and all shapes become one shape like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. There is, too, something unwanted and desolate in this scene; one feels that it has become a wasteland without any purpose or design in nature.

The Turks naturally made no arrangements to defend this part of the coast, since it was inconceivable that an enemy force would land there, or, having landed, would be able to fight in such difficult ground. There is however a good beach just to the south. It runs for a mile or two in a shallow curve to the Gabe Tepe headland, and the country inland is much less broken. Here the Turks posted part of a battalion of infantry. This was not a strong force, but it was well dug in, and from Gaba Tepe the soldiers commanded a fair field of fire along the shore.

It was upon this beach that Hamilton directed his first attack for the conquest of the peninsula, very early on April 25.

Shortly after 2 a.m. three battleships, the Queen[12], Prince of Wales and London, reached their sea rendezvous off Gaba Tepe and stopped to lower their boats. The 1500 Australians who were to make the first assault assembled very quietly on deck. They had their last hot drink, and then, with their heavy packs on their backs and their rifles slung on their shoulders, they went down the Jacob’s ladders in the darkness. They sat tightly packed together in the boats, neither smoking nor talking, as they were towed on towards the shore. Presently they could see the dark smudge of the cliffs on the horizon ahead of them, and beyond this, reflected in the sky, the flash of the Turkish searchlights sweeping the Dardanelles on the other side of the peninsula.

At 4 a.m. when they were still 3,000 yards away, the tows were cast off, the black shapes of the battleships slid slowly astern, and a line of pinnaces, their engines sounding unnaturally loud, went on with the boats towards the shore. There was still no sign of life there. Once a signalman cried out, ‘There’s a light on the starboard bow.’ But it proved to be nothing more than a bright star and there was still no sound but the throbbing of the pinnace engines, the slow fall of the sea on the rocks. When they were within two or three hundred yards of the beach the pinnaces in their turn cast off, and the bluejackets took to the oars. The dawn was breaking.

The men had now been in the boats for several hours, their limbs had grown stiff and cramped, and the tension of waiting was becoming unbearable. It was inconceivable that they had not been seen. Suddenly a rocket soared up from the cliffs, and this was instantly followed by a sharp burst of rifle fire. Here finally was the moment for which they had been trained: the men jumped out of the boats and began wading the last fifty yards to the land. A few were hit, a few were dragged down by the weight of their packs and drowned, but the rest stumbled through the water to the beach. A group of Turks was running down the shore towards them. Forming themselves into a rough line and raising their absurd cry of ‘Imshi Yallah’ the Dominion soldiers fixed their bayonets and charged. Within a few minutes the enemy before them had dropped their rifles and fled. The Anzac legend had begun.

And now suddenly everything seemed to go wrong. The men had been told that they would find level ground and fairly easy going for the first few hundred yards inland from the beach. Instead of this an unknown cliff reached up before them, and as they hauled themselves upward, clutching at roots and boulders, kicking footholes into the rocks, a heavy fire came down on them from the heights above. Soon the air was filled with shouts and cries. Men kept losing their grip and tumbling down into gullies from which apparently there was no egress. Those who gained the first heights went charging off after the enemy and were quickly lost; and those who followed on behind, not knowing where to go, followed new paths of their own in other directions. Officers lost touch with their men, units became hopelessly mixed up and signals failed altogether.

Sunrise revealed a scene which had never been envisaged in Hamilton’s or anybody’s plans. Over an area of several thousand square yards a dozen isolated skirmishes were going on. Small groups of the Australians had penetrated inland for a mile or more; but most of the others were still pinned to the coast where they stumbled about among the rocks and the prickly scrub of the ravines. It was now apparent to everyone that they had not landed on the Gaba Tepe beach at all. In the darkness an uncharted current had swept the boats about a mile north of the intended landing-place and they were now in the midst of the moon landscape of the Sari Bair range.

The situation was almost as bewildering for the Turks as it was for the Dominion troops. They had made no plans whatever to meet this kind of attack. From the Gaba Tepe headland they still commanded the beach, and they drove back any of the Australians who attempted to come along it, but the small cove at which the boats had chanced to make their landfall was blocked from their field of fire and partly screened by jutting cliffs from the heights above. In the hills themselves there was no properly organized defence at all, and it was largely a matter of how far and how fast the Anzac troops could make their way over the tortuous ground — and in some cases this was very far and fast indeed. By 7 a.m. one young officer and two scouts had succeeded in climbing the first three ridges on the coast, and they were able to look down on the calm waters of the Narrows, only three and a half miles away, the object of the whole offensive. Another party was half way up the dominating peak of Chunuk Bair. By 8 a.m. eight thousand men had come ashore, and although there was great confusion everywhere it was clear that at many places the Turks were on the run. The horrors of the dark and the fear of facing bullets for the first time were now over, and an exuberant relief began to spread through the Anzac troops. The officers set about gathering them together for a more coherent advance.

It was at this point that Mustafa Kemal arrived. We have Kemal’s own account of his actions on this day, and there appears to be no reason to doubt his facts since they are confirmed by other people. Since dawn, he says, he had been standing by with his reserve division at Boghali in the neighbourhood of the Narrows, and it was not until 6.30 a.m. that he received an order to send off one battalion to meet the Anzac attack. The march from Boghali was slow and difficult, for the Turks themselves did not know this ground. Two guides who were sent on ahead got lost, and it was Kemal himself who, with a small compass and map in hand, found a way up to the crest of Sari Bair. From here he looked down and saw the warships and the transports in the sea below, but of the actual battle in the broken hills along the shore he could make out nothing at all. His troops were tired after the long hot march, and he gave orders for them to rest while he himself, accompanied by two or three officers, went forward on foot to get a better view. They had reached the slopes of Chunuk Bair when they saw a party of Turkish soldiers running towards them, evidently in full retreat. Kemal shouted to them to stop and asked them why they were running away. ‘Sir, the enemy.’ The men pointed down the hill, and at that moment a detachment of Australian soldiers emerged through the scrub. Already Kemal was a good deal nearer to them than to his own battalion, and he ordered the frightened soldiers about him to stand and fight. When they protested they had no ammunition he forced them to fix their bayonets and lie down in a line on the ground. Seeing this, the Australians also took cover, and while they hesitated Kemal sent his orderly officer running back to bring up his battalion which was waiting out of sight on the other side of the ridge.

In his report, Kemal remarks cryptically, ‘The moment of time that we gained was this one,’ and he goes on to describe how his battalion came up and drove the Australians from the hill.

It seems possible that Kemal’s astonishing career as a commanding general dates from this moment, for he saw what neither Liman von Sanders nor anybody else had seen — that Chunuk Bair and the Sari Bair ridge had become the key to the whole southern half of the peninsula. Once established on these heights the Allies would dominate the Narrows and direct their artillery fire where they wished for a dozen miles around. Indeed, the whole system of the Turkish defence was based upon the principle that they must hold the hills so that they could overlook the enemy and constantly force him to attack; and these were the most important hills of all. It was not distance that counted on Gallipoli, nor even the number of soldiers or the guns of the Fleet; it was a simple issue of the hills. Later on fifty thousand men were to lose their lives around Chunuk Bair in establishing this fact.

From the Allies’ point of view it was one of the cruellest accidents of the campaign that this one junior Turkish commander of genius should have been at this particular spot at this moment, for otherwise the Australians and New Zealanders might very well have taken Chunuk Bair that morning, and the battle might have been decided then and there.

After the war the Turkish General Staff noted in its history of the campaign: ‘Had the British been able to throw stronger forces ashore at Gaba Tepe either by reinforcing more rapidly those first disembarked, or by landing on a broader front, the initial successful advance of 2,500 yards in depth might have been extended so as to include the ridges overlooking the straits, and a serious, perhaps fatal, blow struck at the heart of the Turkish defences.’

Kemal realized at once that his single battalion was quite inadequate in this situation. He therefore ordered up the whole of his best regiment, the Turkish 57th, and then when heavy fighting developed he committed one of his Arab regiments as well. As a divisional commander he had no authority whatever to do this — these were the only reserves Liman possessed, and their position would have been hopeless if the Allies had planned yet another landing in another place. It was not until the end of the morning, however, that Kemal galloped back to Corps Headquarters and informed Essad Pasha of what he had done. At the same time he asked for permission to throw in the third and last regiment of the 19th Division. The battle had now grown so furious and threatening that Essad had no choice but to agree, and Kemal came back to assume command along the whole Anzac front. He never again left it until the campaign was virtually over.

There is an air of inspired desperation about Kemal’s actions this day, and he even seems to have gone a little berserk at times. Instinctively he must have realized thtat his great chance had come, that he was either going to die here or make his name at last. He was constantly at the extreme front, helping to wheel guns into position, getting up on the skyline among the bullets, sending his men into attacks in which they had very little hope of survival. One of his orders was worded: ‘I don’t order you to attack, I order you to die. In the time which passes until we die other troops and commanders can take our places.’ The soldiers got up from the ground and ran into the rifle and machine-gun fire; and presently the 57th Turkish Regiment was demolished.

It was the most confused of battles, for the Anzac troops were also determined to attack, despite the disorder of their first landing and the mixing up of their units, despite the fact that nowhere could the guns of the Fleet bring them any help in this bewildering country. There was no front line. The men landing on the beach were as much exposed to the snipers’ bullets as those a mile inland. Advancing up a gully the soldiers would suddenly find themselves in the midst of the Turks, and hand-to-hand fighting with the bayonet began. Ridges were stormed and lost, and then abandoned by both sides. Units fighting side by side lost touch not only with their headquarters but with each other, and there were times when the bullets like cross-currents in the wind seemed to be coming from several different directions at once.

And so all through the midday hours the wild scramble went on and no one could be sure of anything except that the Allies were ashore and building up their reinforcements with every hour that went by.

Meanwhile a battle of a very different kind was being fought by the British at Cape Helles, some thirteen miles away to the south. It will be remembered that the 29th Division (with some additional troops) under Hunter-Weston was to make five separate landings around the toe of the peninsula in the vicinity of the village Sedd-el-Bahr. This was regarded as the spearhead of the whole Allied offensive. Sedd-el-Bahr had been scanned many times from the sea, and it presented a perfect target for the naval guns. To the right of the little cove there was a ruined medieval fortress with a minuscule village behind it. Beside this fortress the land sloped quite gently down to a small gravelly beach no more than 300 yards long and 10 yards wide. Although it was known that this natural amphitheatre had been entrenched and sown with barbed wire it seemed likely that the whole area could be so savaged and cut about by the naval barrage that very little fight would be left in the defenders by the time the first British troops got ashore.

Accordingly at 5 a.m. in the uncertain first light of the morning the battleship Albion opened up a tremendous bombardment on the village and the cove. There was no reply from the shore. After an hour it was judged that the Turks there must either be demoralized or dead, and the River Clyde with her two thousand men on board was ordered to the shore. About twenty small boats all filled with men went with her. There was some little delay in the programme, for the current setting down the Dardanelles was much stronger than anyone had guessed, and the launches with the small boats in tow made slow headway against it. At one time the River Clyde got ahead of them and had to be brought back into position.

Thus it was in broad daylight and on the calmest of seas that the soldiers approached the shore. An unnatural stillness had succeeded the barrage. Neither on the beach nor in the fortress nor on the slopes above was there movement of any kind. At 6.22 a.m. the River Clyde grounded her bows without a tremor just below the fortress, and the first of the boats was within a few yards of the shore.

In that instant the Turkish rifle fire burst out. It was a frightful fire, and it was made more shocking by the silence that had preceded it. Far from being demoralized, the Turks had crept back to their trenches as soon as the bombardment was over, and they were now firing from a few yards away into the packed mass of screaming, struggling men in the boats. Some few among the British jumped into the water and got to the shelter of a little bank on the far side of the beach, and there they huddled while the storm of bullets passed over their heads. The others died in the boats just as they stood, crowded shoulder to shoulder, without even the grace of an instant of time to raise their rifles. When all were dead or wounded — the midshipmen and sailors as well as the soldiers — the boats drifted helplessly away. This was the beach on which the Marines had walked in perfect safety two months before.

Many strange scenes occurred because the men persisted in trying to do the things they had been told to do. A sailor from the Lord Nelson, for example, managed to pole his cutter up to the beach, but when he turned to beckon his passengers to the shore he found that they were no longer alive. The boy was observed to be standing there in wonder when he too was struck and his boat slid back into the sea.

Meanwhile Commander Unwin was having difficulty aboard the River Clyde. Her bows were still divided by an expanse of deep water from the shore, and when they tried to bring the steam hopper round to fill the gap it was swept away to port by the current and lay broadside to the beach, where it was useless. It was vital now that the two lighters should be brought round from the stern to make the causeway between the ship and the shore. Unwin left the bridge and dived overboard with a tow rope in his hand. He was at once followed into the water by an able seaman named Williams. Together the two men swam to the shore, and while still standing waistdeep in water and under heavy fire they managed to get the lighters lashed together and placed before the bows. Bracing himself against the current, Unwin held the more landward of the two lighters in position and shouted to the soldiers in the River Clyde to come ashore.

The men at once came running down the gangways along the ship’s sides, and as they ran they presented a target which was not unlike the line of moving objects one sees sometimes in a shooting gallery at a village fair. Having beaten off the smaller boats the Turks were now able to give all their attention to this new assault. They opened up their fire from both sides of the ship, and soon the gangways became jammed with dead and dying. Those of the British who succeeded in reaching the lighters found themselves exposed to an even closer fire, and presently Williams was hit. Not knowing that he was dead, Unwin propped him up in the water and in doing so let go his grip on the lighter. Immediately it was swept away in the current, spilling its cargo of wounded into the sea.

Air Commodore Samson came flying over Sedd-el-Bahr at this moment, and looking down saw that the calm blue sea was ‘absolutely red with blood’ for a distance of fifty yards from the shore, ‘a horrible sight to see.’ Red ripples washed up on the beach, and everywhere the calm surface of the water was whipped up into a ghastly discoloured foam by thousands of falling bullets. The sun was shining brightly.

The British had now reached that point in a battle which is the most terrible of all — the point where the leaders feel they must persist in attacking although all hope has gone. Just for a short time they live in this meaningless and heroic limbo which is at the edge of panic, and which makes a kind of welcome to death. It is a feeling which perhaps the parachutist knows when for the first time he jumps from the aircraft into the sky. The senseless attack had to continue for a little longer until it was sufficiently demonstrated that the thing was impossible, until enough of the general pool of courage had vanished with the dead, and shock and exhaustion had overcome them all. And so they kept pulling the lighters back into position, and the men kept running out of the ship and the Turks kept killing them.

When Commander Unwin collapsed in the water through cold and exhaustion a naval lieutenant and two midshipmen jumped in to take his place. After an hour’s rest aboard the River Clyde Unwin was back in the water again, dressed in a white shirt and flannel trousers (his uniform had been ripped off his back), and there he remained, struggling with the lighters, bringing the wounded off the beach, until again he collapsed and was carried away.

By 9.30 a.m., when the casualties were being numbered in many hundreds, it was becoming apparent to the soldiers at last that they could do no more. Barely two hundred had reached the shelter of the little bank on the beach, and the barbed wire before them was hung with the corpses of the men who had tried to cut a way through to the Turkish trenches. A thousand others remained inside the River Clyde, and they were safe enough there with the bullets hammering on the armoured plates of the ship, but directly they showed themselves at the sallyports the killing began again. Only the machine-guns mounted behind sandbags in the bows of the ship were able to keep firing.

General Hunter-Weston was at sea aboard the cruiser Euryalus all this time, and he knew little or nothing of what was going on. Accordingly he put the next part of the plan into action: Brigadier-General Napier was ordered to the shore with the main body of the troops. The transports steamed slowly forward to the point where they had a rendezvous with the boats which had taken the first assault troops to the shore. Had this meeting ever taken place a massacre of far greater proportions would certainly have occurred. But of the original assault force there remained barely half a dozen boats with living crews. These now came up to the transports and having emptied out their dead and wounded, the sailors stood by to return to the shore. There was room only for Napier, his staff and a few of his soldiers. As they approached the beach, the General was hailed by the men on the River Clyde who wanted to warn him that it was useless to continue. Napier, however, did not understand the situation. He came alongside the lighters, and seeing them filled with men sprang on board to lead them to the shore. But they made no response to his orders and he realized then that they were all dead. From the decks of the River Clyde they called to the General again, ‘You can’t possibly land.’ Napier shouted back, ‘I’ll have a damned good try.’ He tried, but he was dead before he reached the beach.

With this the assault landing at Sedd-el-Bahr came to an end.

Meanwhile the other four landings at Cape Helles had been going forward and with much better success. After heavy fighting near Tekke Burnu, about a mile away to the west, considerable numbers of soldiers were ashore on two beaches there, and towards midday Hunter-Weston began to divert his reinforcements to this point. To the east, in Morto Bay, another force had scrambled up the cliffs with trifling loss at Eski Hissarlik Point, and was securely ensconced. But the commander at Eski Hissarlik had no orders to go to the relief of Sedd-el-Bahr — indeed, he had no knowledge of what was going on there — so he stayed where he was and entrenched.

An even stranger situation had developed at the fifth landing place, a point which had been called ‘Y’ beach, about four miles up the coast on the western side of the peninsula. This landing was Hamilton’s own idea; he had planned to spring a trap on the Turks by getting 2,000 men ashore in this isolated spot. Their mission was to take the Turks in the rear and perhaps even cut them off entirely by marching across the tip of the peninsula and joining up with the other landings in the south. There was no actual beach at this point, but a cleft in the cliffs seemed to offer a fairly easy way up to the heights 200 feet above, and reconnaissance from the sea had revealed that the Turks had established no defences on the shore.[13]

This enterprise opened with astonishing success. The 2,000 men landed and climbed up the cliffs without a single shot being fired at them. At the top there was no sign of the enemy at all. While their senior officers strolled about through the scrub inspecting the position the men sat down to smoke and brew themselves a cup of morning tea. And so the morning was whiled away. Less than an hour’s march to the south their comrades at Sedd-el-Bahr and Tekke Burnu were being destroyed but they knew nothing of this. They heard the distant sounds of firing through the clear sunlit air, but they made no move in that direction. Had they but known it these troops at Y beach were equal in numbers to the whole of the Turkish forces in the tip of the peninsula that morning; they could have marched forward at will and encircled the entire enemy position. By midday they might have cleared the way to Achi Baba and turned a massacre into a brilliant victory.

It is doubtful however whether the soldiers at Y beach would have acted with very much initiative even if they had known these things, for their operation had been planned in circumstances of the utmost confusion. Two colonels had been landed with the force, and each thought he was in command. No one had bothered to tell Colonel Koe that he was in fact subordinate to Colonel Matthews, and in any case neither of the two men had been given any dear instructions. Both seem to have imagined that, far from exploiting the enemy’s rear, his mission was to stay where he was until the British who had landed in the south came up and made contact, and so all would march forward safely together. Messages were sent off from Y beach to the Euryalus through the day asking for information and instructions, but there was no reply from Hunter-Weston, and neither of the two colonels felt that he could take things into his own hands.

Quite early in the day Hamilton came by in the Queen Elizabeth and saw the peaceful bivouac on Y beach. Roger Keyes begged him to put more troops in there at once: the Royal Naval Division then making a demonstration at Bulair (the demonstration that was deceiving Liman von Sanders), could, he said, be brought down and landed before sunset. But Hamilton felt that he could not give the order without Hunter-Weston’s consent. He sent off a signal to him: ‘Would you like to get some more men ashore on Y beach? If so, trawlers are available.’ To this there was no answer, and the message had to be repeated an hour or two later before Hunter-Weston finally replied: ‘Admiral Wemyss and principal transport officer state that to interfere with present arrangements and try and land men at Y beach would delay disembarkation.’

Thus by midday an extraordinary situation had come about. The main assault of the British in the centre was being held up and was in danger of failing altogether, while two subsidiary forces which were perfectly capable of destroying the whole Turkish garrison of 2,000 men sat by in idleness on either flank. Under the existing system of command there was no immediate way out of this impasse. Hamilton was beginning to understand the position, but he refused to intervene. Hunter-Weston might have put things to rights, but he failed to do so because he did not comprehend what was happening. All his three brigade commanders at Cape Helles had by now become casualties, and two of the colonels who had replaced them had been instantly killed. Therefore there was no senior officer on shore, no tactical headquarters which could rally the men and keep the corps commander informed. It was left to the junior officers and the men themselves to make what shift they could out of whatever resources of courage and discipline remained to them in the bewildering chaos of the battle.

This tragic situation continued throughout the day. The naval gunners yearned to intervene and kept asking the soldiers for targets. But only the most confusing signals came out from the shore, and so for long periods at a stretch the ships were forced to stand helplessly by in the hateful security of the sea. Often the ships were so close that the sailors could see the Turks running about on the shore. Then they fired with a will. But they could not always be certain that they were not firing on their own men. The captains kept asking one another on the wireless, ‘Are any of our troops dressed in blue? Have we landed any cavalry?’

At Sedd-el-Bahr another attempt was made to get the remaining soldiers off the River Clyde at 4 p.m., and this time a few did manage to get to the beach. They were cheered on by the little group who had huddled under the protection of the bank all day. But then the Turkish rifle fire made things impossible again. At 5.30 p.m. the village burst into flames under a new bombardment from the sea, thick smoke rolled over the battlefield and a red glare filled the evening sky. But it was clear that nothing more could be done until night fell. At Tekke Burnu things improved somewhat as more troops came ashore, but there was still no help from either flank: at Eski Hissarlik the British commander still judged himself too weak to make the two-mile march around to Sedd-el-Bahr, and in fact he was expressly forbidden to attempt it. And at Y beach, where the troops had been left undisturbed for eleven hours, retribution had at last begun: the Turks fell upon the bridgehead from the north in the evening light, and finding the British had not bothered to entrench themselves properly, continued the attack all night.

The rest of the Y beach story is brief and bitter, and can be conveniently told here. By dawn the following day there were 700 casualties, and many of the men began to straggle down the cliffs to the shore. Colonel Koe was now dead and in the absence of any clear authority a panic began. Frantic messages asking for boats were sent out to the Navy, and the Navy, believing that an evacuation had been ordered, began to take the men off. Colonel Matthews with the rest of his force on the cliff above knew nothing of all this. He fought on. At 7 a.m. he drove off a heavy Turkish attack with the bayonet, and in the lull that followed he made a tour of his position. He then discovered for the first time that a whole section of his line had been abandoned. His position was now so insecure that he felt he had no choice but to acquiesce in the retirement, and a general evacuation began. At this very moment the Turks, on their side, decided that they had been beaten, and they too withdrew; and so the British came off Y beach in the same way as they had arrived, without another casualty, without the sound of a shot being fired. In the afternoon of April 26 Roger Keyes’s brother, Lieutenant-Commander Adrian Keyes, went ashore in a boat to look for wounded men who might have been left behind. He climbed the cliff and walked about for an hour among the abandoned British equipment. No one answered his calls. A perfect silence had settled on the air and the battlefield was empty.

All this, of course, was unknown and unguessed at on the other parts of the Cape Helles front as night at last began to fall on April 25. The night was the friend of the attackers. Little by little the Turkish fire began to slacken, and the aim of their gunners became uncertain. At Sedd-el-Bahr the men under the bank on the beach were able to put up their heads at last. Tentatively at first, and then with growing confidence, they crept out of their hiding-places to clear away the dead from the lighters and gather up the wounded from the beach. As the night advanced all the remaining men on the River Clyde were brought off without a single casualty. Everywhere along the line a furtive movement began under the cover of the darkness. Men crawled through the scrub to safer positions, and dug themselves entrenchments in the rocky ground. Others went forward to the barbed wire which had held them up all day and cut pathways through it. From out at sea the naval guns opened up again, and boats filled with fresh troops and stores of food and water began to reach the shore. Midshipmen and even the captains of ships took a hand in carrying boxes of ammunition up the cliffs.

By midnight the British no doubt might have gone forward again and perhaps overwhelmed the Turks in the tip of the peninsula. But there was still no senior officer ashore who was able to give them a lead. It was feared that an enemy counter-attack might start at any moment, and no one as yet had the slightest notion that they now outnumbered the enemy in Cape Helles by six to one. A dullness, a kind of mental paralysis, had followed the shock of the violent battles of the day, the unknown still loomed before them in the darkness.

The Turks in fact were in no position even to consider a counter-attack. Of their original 2,000 men who opposed the five Cape Helles landings half were casualties. A Turkish message captured on the following day gives an idea of their condition in the frontline trenches. ‘Captain,’ it runs, ‘you must either send up reinforcements and drive the enemy into the sea or let us evacuate this place because it is absolutely certain that they will land more troops tonight. Send the doctors to carry off my wounded. Alas alas, Captain, for God’s sake send me reinforcements because hundreds of soldiers are landing. Hurry. What on earth will happen, Captain?’

Nothing happened. Fusillades of shots broke out and died away. Men fired at shadows. A light rain began to fall. Confused, exhausted, isolated in the small circle of their own experiences, the soldiers waited for the morning.

Hamilton on board the Queen Elizabeth made a 5,000-word entry in his diary that night. In the course of it he wrote: ‘Should the Fates so decree, the whole brave Army may disappear during the night more dreadfully than that of Sennacherib; but assuredly they will not surrender; where so much is dark, where many are discouraged, in this knowledge I feel both light and joy. Here I write — think — have my being. Tomorrow night where shall we be? Well; what then; what of the worst? At least we shall have lived, acted, dared. We are half way through — we shall not look back.’

There were on the whole, he decided, fair grounds for optimism. Hunter-Weston should certainly be in a position to attack towards Achi Baba on the morrow. Reassuring messages had been coming in from Birdwood through the afternoon: he was engaged in heavy fighting all along the Anzac front, but 15,000 men had been landed there during the day. They should certainly be able to hold on. Not the least cheering news had come in from the French, who, remote from all the world, had been fighting a private battle of their own on the Asiatic side of the Straits. They had gone ashore a little late but in grand style near Orkanie Mound (the reputed tomb of Achilles), with a regiment of native African troops, and with a spirited bayonet charge had actually seized the ruined fortress of Kum Kale. That operation, at least, had been a complete success. The French, having completed their diversion, were ready now to be re-embarked and landed as reinforcements for the main offensive at Cape Helles. For a while Hamilton pondered the wisdom of this: since they had done so well should they not remain? But in the end he decided to stick to the plan; Kitchener had forbidden him to fight in Asia.[14]

So then, in general, things were not too bad. Except at Kum Kale, none of the first day’s objectives had been taken, but they were ashore with nearly 30,000 men. Along the whole front there had been frightful casualties, but that was to be expected on the first day and no doubt the Turks had suffered heavily as well. At all costs they must push on both from Anzac and Helles as soon as day broke.

Heartened by this review of the situation Hamilton went to his cabin towards 11 p.m. and fell asleep.

He was woken an hour later by Braithwaite shaking him by the shoulder and calling, ‘Sir Ian. Sir Ian.’ When he opened his eyes he heard his chief-of-staff saying, ‘Sir Ian, you’ve got to come right along — a question of life or death — you must settle it.’

Putting a British warm over his pyjamas Hamilton crossed to the Admiral’s dining saloon, and there he found de Robeck himself, Rear Admiral Thursby, Roger Keyes and several others. A message had arrived from Birdwood asking for permission to abandon the whole Anzac position at Gaba Tepe.

Mustafa Kemal had kept up his fanatical attack on the Anzac beach-head all afternoon. At 4 p.m. the Dominion troops began to fall back towards the coast from the outlying positions they had taken in their first rush. By nightfall they were in a state of siege. But this alone had not caused the crisis in Birdwood’s lines: the fatal error of the original misplaced landing was beginning to take its effect. Birdwood had expected to seize a strip of coast at least a mile in length, instead of which he found himself in possession of one small beach barely 1000 yards long and 30 yards wide. Everything coming ashore had to be fed through this bottleneck. Earlier in the day a small jetty had been built. But in the afternoon the congestion on the shore became intense. Animals, guns, ammunition and stores of every kind were dumped together in confusion on the sand, and there was no question of dispersing them until more territory had been gained. The whole Anzac position was less than two miles long and about three-quarters of a mile deep. No one could get inland. Bridges and Godley, the two divisional commanders, and their staffs were crammed together in a gully a few yards from the beach, and the headquarters of the brigades were almost on top of them. Hospitals, signalling units, artillery batteries and even prisoners’ cages perched where they could among the rocks.

The wounded meanwhile were coming down from the hills in an endless stream, and were dumped in their stretchers in rows along the shore. Soon the whole of one end of the beach was covered with them, and there they lay, many of them in great pain, waiting to be taken off to the ships. While they waited a constant storm of bullets and shrapnel broke over their heads; and indeed, everyone on that crowded beach from generals to donkey drivers was under fire, for the Turks overlooked them from three sides. In desperation one of the officers in charge on the beach ordered every boat that came ashore to help in taking the casualties away, and this not only disorganized and delayed the disembarkation programme, it exposed the wounded to further suffering as well. Some were taken from transport to transport only to be sent away since there were no medical facilities on board; all the doctors and their staffs had gone to the shore.

On the front line — or rather at the changing points of contact with the enemy — the soldiers had had little opportunity of digging in. Their light trenching tools were not very effective among the rocks and the tough roots of the scrub, and at some places the slopes were too steep for them to dig in at all. They were in desperate need of artillery support, but because of the ragged nature of the country and the uncertainty of the front line there was very little the naval guns could do. By nightfall the situation was not yet critical but it was becoming so. It had been a long exhausting day, and the men were beginning to feel the intense psychological strain of always being looked down upon from above, their every move watched, their smallest gestures attracting the snipers’ bullets.

Many stragglers began to come down to the tiny beach on which already 15,000 men had been landed that day. For the most part these men were simply those who had lost touch with their units, and believing themselves isolated had returned to the only rallying point they knew. Some were in search of food and water. Others considered that they were entitled to a breather after a hard day. They dropped in exhaustion on any level piece of ground they could find, oblivious of the bursting shrapnel, and when they woke they were unable to return to the front because they could not find their way. These leaderless men added to the confusion and created an atmosphere of doubt and discouragement around the headquarters.

By nightfall, from almost every point of the bridgehead, desperate calls were coming in for more reinforcements, for ammunition, for artillery fire and for men to take the wounded away. The front line, it seemed, was breaking. It was in these circumstances that at 9.15 p.m. Bridges and Godley sent a message to General Birdwood aboard the Queen, asking him to come ashore at once. Birdwood, who had been on shore all afternoon, returned to the beach, and there he learned with astonishment that his two divisional generals, both Bridges the Australian, and Godley the Englishman, were in favour of an immediate evacuation.

Birdwood at first refused to accept this proposition, but he was persuaded as the conference went on: the troops were worn out and in the appalling terrain there was no reasonable chance of making any headway. If the Turks developed a counter-attack and a heavy bombardment next day the situation might get out of control.

Huddled together around candles in an improvised dug-out and with the rain falling outside and the wounded all about them, it cannot have been easy for the commanders to have taken a very hopeful view of the situation. In the end Birdwood sat down and dictated to Godley the following message for the Commander-in-Chief:

This was the message which was placed before Hamilton when he was woken aboard the Queen Elizabeth at midnight that night.

The scene in de Robeck’s dining saloon was more oppressive than dramatic, and yet it has an oddly spot-lighted quality that sets it apart from any other such conference in the Gallipoli campaign: the General standing there in his pyjamas reading Birdwood’s message, the others gathered around him in silence, the orderlies waiting at the door. This was either to be the ending of the campaign or a new beginning. Just for these few moments the action of the battle stops like a moving picture that has been arrested on the screen, and one concentrates upon this single group. To gain time, Hamilton asked a question or two of the officers who had come from the shore, but they could tell him nothing more. Admiral Thursby, who was in charge of the naval side of the Anzac landing, gave it as his opinion that it would take several days to get the soldiers back into the ships. Braithwaite had nothing to say.

For Hamilton there was no escape; he alone had to take the decision and it had to be taken at once. Already all available boats had been ordered to stand by for the evacuation. Yet there was something missing in this unbearable proposition — some one hard definite factor that would enable him to make up his mind.

Turning to Thursby, Hamilton said, ‘Well then, tell me, Admiral, what do you think?’

Thursby answered, ‘What do I think? Well, I think myself they will stick it out if only it is put to them that they must.’

It was at this point that Keyes was handed a wireless message from Lieut.-Commander Stoker, the captain of the submarine AE 2, saying that he had penetrated the Narrows and had reached the Sea of Marmara. Keyes read the telegram aloud and turning to Hamilton added, ‘Tell them this. It is an omen — an Australian submarine has done the finest feat in submarine history, and is going to torpedo all the ships bringing reinforcements into Gallipoli.’

Upon this Hamilton sat down, and in a general silence wrote to Birdwood:

In an instant, with this message the action starts moving forward again. Aboard the Queen Elizabeth, back on the beach at Anzac Cove, among the soldiers in the front line, everyone suddenly feels an immense relief, everyone perversely finds his courage all over again. Now that they have got to fight it out the dangers appear to be half as formidable as they were before.

It was the postscript of the letter which contained the required touch of inspiration, for when it was read out to the soldiers on shore they began at once, quite literally, to dig. Here was something definite to do; you dug your way down to safety. Officers and men alike, on the beach and in the hills, set about hacking at the ground, and as the hours went by and still no Turkish counter-attack came in, all the seaward slopes of the Sari Bair range began to resemble a vast mining camp. It was not long after this that the Australian soldiers became known as Diggers, and that name has remained with them ever since.

But there was, in fact, no possibility of a serious Turkish counter-attack at Anzac Cove that night or even on the following day. With 2,000 casualties in his ranks not even Mustafa Kemal could do more than launch a series of heavy raids that were never quite strong enough to push Birdwood into the sea. Everywhere along the front, at Cape Helles as well as Anzac, the first phase was already over. The moment of surprise had gone. Hamilton had declared his plan and Liman was reacting to it. Both sides now began to mass men on the two main battlefields, the Turks still convinced that they could throw the Allies into the sea, the Allies still believing that they could advance upon the Narrows. At this moment nobody could have persuaded either of the two generals or their soldiers that they were wrong. So long as their hopes held they were committed to a vast slaughter.

From this point onwards the element of the unexpected gradually dies away from the battle, the chances are calculated chances, the attacks and the counter-attacks foreknown, and only exhaustion can put an end to the affair.