Gallipoli

CHAPTER ELEVEN

DURING the months of June and July neither side made any serious attempt to attack at Anzac, and while an uneasy stalemate continued there five pitched battles were fought at Cape Helles. They were all frontal attacks, all of short duration, a day or two or even less, and none of them succeeded in altering the front line by more than half a mile.[19]

This fighting at Cape Helles was the heaviest of the campaign, and it followed the strict pattern of trench warfare: the preliminary bombardment, the charge of the infantry (sometimes as many as five men to four yards of front), the counter-attack, and then the last confused spasmodic struggles to consolidate the line. Nowhere at any time were any important objectives gained; at the end of it all the Turks were no nearer to driving the Allies into the sea and the Allies were hardly any closer to Achi Baba. Even in the killing of men neither side could claim the advantage, since it is estimated that for the period from the first landings in April to the end of July the total casualties were about the same for each: some 57,000 men.

These battles were so repetitive, so ant-like and inconclusive, that it is almost impossible to discover any meaning in them unless one remembers the tremendous hopes with which each action was begun. The generals really did think that they could get through, and so for a while did the soldiers too. Hunter-Weston, the British Corps Commander, was an extremely confident man. ‘Casualties,’ he said one day, ‘what do I care for casualties?’ The remark might not have been particularly distressing to his soldiers; they too were quite prepared for casualties provided they defeated the Turks, and in any case it was nothing remarkable that the General still believed that victories could be achieved by this kind of fighting; with very few exceptions all the other generals, German, Turkish, French and British, in France as well as Gallipoli, believed the same thing. The artillery bombardment followed by the charge of the infantry was believed to be the surgical act that would bring success in the quickest way, and nobody had yet suggested any alternative to it except, of course, poison gas. The real answer to the problem was simple enough: they needed an armoured mobile gun that would break through the enemy machine-gun fire; in other words a tank. But in 1915 the tank was a year or more and several million lives away, and it seemed to both Turkish and Allied staffs alike that they had only to intensify what they were already doing — to employ more men and more guns on narrower fronts — and the enemy would crack.

Since the rules of the game, the actual methods of the fighting, were not in question, the generals had to find other reasons to explain their failure, and on the side of the Allies it usually boiled down to a matter of ammunition. If only they had had more shells to fire all would have been well. Just a few more rounds, another few guns, and the miracle would have happened. It had already been demonstrated at Gallipoli — and it was to be demonstrated over and over again on a much larger scale in France — that artillery bombardment was not the real way out of this suicidal impasse, but the British were strictly rationed in shells at Gallipoli, and this very shortage seemed to indicate that this was where their fatal weakness lay. Through June and July, there were times when Hamilton could think of nothing else, and he sent off message after message to Kitchener pointing out how badly served he was in the matter of ammunition compared with the armies in France.

‘A purely passive defence is not possible for us,’ he wrote; ‘it implies losing ground by degrees — and we have not a yard to lose… But, to expect us to attack without giving us our fair share — on Western standards — of high explosive and howitzers shows lack of military imagination.’ He went on: ‘If only K. would come and see for himself! Failing that — if only it were possible for me to run home and put my own case.’ But he did not go. Sometimes his staff found him looking aged and tired.

Through these months a gradual change overtook the commanders at Cape Helles in the planning of their battles. They did not lose hope, they simply lowered their sights. In the beginning the Allies had envisaged an advance upon Constantinople itself and cavalry was held in reserve for that purpose. By June they were concentrating upon Achi Baba, and the more the hill remained unconquered the more important it seemed: the more it appeared to swell up physically before them on the horizon. By July they were thinking in still more restricted terms: of advances of 700 or 800 yards, of the capture of two or three lines of the enemy trenches. In the same way the Turks gradually began to give up their notions of ‘pushing the enemy into the sea’. After July they tried no more headlong assaults; they were content to contain the Allies and harass them, in their narrow foothold on the sea.

In the many books that were written about the campaign soon after the first world war, there is a constantly repeated belief that posterity would never forget what happened there. Such and such a regiment’s bayonet charge will ‘go down in history’; the deed is ‘immortal’ or ‘imperishable’, is enshrined forever in the records of the past. But who in this generation has heard of Lancashire Landing or Gully Ravine or the Third Battle of Krithia? Even as names they have almost vanished out of memory, and whether this hill was taken or that trench was lost seems hardly to matter any more. All becomes lost in a confused impression of waste and fruitless heroism, of out-of-dateness and littleness in another age. And yet if one forgets the actual battles — the statistics, the plans, the place-names, the technical moves — and studies instead the battlefield itself in its quieter moments, the feelings of the soldiers, what they ate and wore and thought and talked about, the small circumstances of their daily lives, the scene does become alive again and in a peculiarly vivid way. There can scarcely have been a battlefield quite like it in this or any other way.

Usually one approached Cape Helles from either Imbros or Lemnos in one of the trawlers or flat-bottomed boats that provided a kind of ferry service to the beaches after the battleships had sailed away. By day it was a pleasant trip through a sea of cool peacock blue, and it was only when one was within about five miles of the shore that one saw that it was overhung by a vast yellowish cloud of dust. This dust increased during heavy fighting and diminished at night, and with sudden changes of the wind, but it was usually there through these months of early summer. And with the dust a sickly carrion smell came out across the sea, as far as three miles at times. A fringe of debris with the same implications of rottenness and decay washed along the shore. Yet on a quiet day there was a certain toy-like quality in the scene around Sedd-el-Bahr — toylike in the sense that it was very busy, very crowded with ingenious imitations of ordinary life in other, safer places. The long green keel of the Majestic was still clearly visible beneath the sea, and the castle by the beach had a battered appearance as though someone had stamped on it with his foot. The River Clyde was still there, firmly moored to the shore with lighters and other small boats all about her, and she was joined now by another vessel, the old French battleship Magenta, which had been sunk about a quarter of a mile to the west to form a miniature harbour in the bay. Piers had sprung up, and around them thousands of men were bathing, unloading boats, stacking great piles of tins and boxes on the shore. A new road had been cut around the base of the cliff by Turkish prisoners, and lines of horses and mules stood waiting there.

‘The comparison with a seaside resort on a fine bank holiday,’ Compton Mackenzie wrote, ‘arrived so inevitably as really to seem rather trite. Yet all the time the comparison was justifying itself. Even the aeroplanes on the top of the low cliff eastward had the look of an ‘amusement’ to provide a sixpenny or threepenny thrill; the tents might so easily conceal phrenologists or fortune tellers; the signal station might well be a camera obscura; the very carts of the Indian Transport, seen through the driven sand, had an air of waiting goat-carriages.’

With this, however, all further comparison ended; the dust covered all, billowing, choking and vile, and the Turkish shells came through it with the noise of express trains crashing in the sky. This noise was continuous at times, and the soldiers endured it, not as a temporary pain, but as a natural condition of life. It was as inevitable as the weather. You were hit or not hit. Eating, sleeping and waking the long scream went on. These slopes by the sea were supposed to be rest areas, but they were often more dangerous than the frontline trenches a mile or two inland, since they exposed such obvious targets to the enemy: the piers, the incoming boats, the men bathing. From their perch on Achi Baba the Turks overlooked the whole bridgehead, and when the dust lifted they could see every tent, every gun emplacement, every man and animal that moved above the cliffs. The horses and the mules were terribly exposed to this bombardment, but they appeared to notice nothing until they were actually hit. Some blessed lacuna in the brain allowed them to stand there calmly with unfrightened eyes when the bursting shrapnel had sent all human beings to the ground. ‘Fountains of earth, fountains of water,’ a French doctor wrote to his wife; ‘shells cover us with a vault of steel, dissolving, hissing and noisy… without this radiantly beautiful light it would be frightfully sad.’

There were some — notably the more elderly men who were experiencing shellfire for the first time — who simply could not stand it and had to be invalided home: ‘Weak minds were upset,’ the doctor wrote. ‘Few were able to keep a real and immediate notion of things. There is a physical exaltation which deforms and obscures everything and makes one incapable of reasoning.’

The cool weather had lasted until the end of May, and during that time the soldiers were perfectly healthy. May was an idyllic month that year with wild flowers blooming everywhere, even between the front lines, and tremendous sunsets fell on Imbros and the monolithic rock of Samothrace. The shelling was not really troublesome and the men slept in tents. Then in June when the Turks set up their big guns behind Achi Baba a furious digging began, and the Army went underground into trenches and dugouts, sometimes uncovered to the sky, sometimes with a sheet of galvanized iron and a layer of earth for a roof. At first there was no regular shelling from Asia and the side of the cliffs facing south and east was a favourite spot for a home; it was known as Sea View Terrace. Then one day new guns opened up from Kum Kale across the straits, and the shells burst directly at the front doors of the dugouts which had seemed so safe before. The French corps held the eastern tip of the peninsula opposite Asia, and they suffered worst of all: 2,000 quarts of irreplaceable wine went up one day. By the end of the month a network of trenches and sunken roads stretched outward from the beaches to the front line, and it was possible to walk for miles without showing one’s head above the ground.

The colours of the landscape changed. Grass vanished from the ground, and in place of green crops there were now wide areas covered with the fading purple flowers of the wild thyme, the dried-up sticks of asphodel, an occasional dusty pink oleander, a green fig or a pomegranate with its little flame-coloured blossom on the fruit. All the rest was brown and bare and ankle-deep in dust, a semi-desert scene. With the increasing heat the summer insects and animals emerged, and many of the soldiers, their lives narrowed down to the few square yards of ground around them, became aware for the first time of tarantulas and centipedes, the scorpion and the lizard, the incessant midday racket of the cicadas in the trees. Mackenzie, straining his eyes through his binoculars to see an attack at the front, found a tortoise crawling across his line of vision.

By July the heat reached a steady eighty-four degrees in the shade. But there was no shade: from four in the morning until eight at night the sun glared down and made an oven out of every trench and dug-out. It was a fearful heat, so hot that the fat of the bully beef melted in the tins, and a metal plate would become too hot to touch. Some of the soldiers were supplied with topees, but most wore the same uniform which had been issued to the Army in France: a flat peaked cap, a thick khaki serge tunic and breeches, puttees and boots. There were no steel helmets.

On the heights above, the Turks had a constant supply of good drinking water, but with the exception of one or two springs in Gully Ravine there were no wells in the Cape Helles bridgehead; water had to be brought by sea from the Nile in Egypt, 700 miles away, pumped ashore and carried up to the front by mules. Sometimes the men were down to a third of a gallon of water a day for all purposes, and it was even worse at Anzac, where they were forced to condense salt water from the sea.

In the end probably these discomforts were not too much, and the men adjusted themselves. But the thing that was absolutely unbearable was the flies. They began to multiply in May; by June they were a plague, and it was a plague of such foulness and persistence that it often seemed more horrible than the war itself. The flies fed on the unburied corpses in no-man’s-land, and on the latrines, the refuse and the food of both armies. There was no escape for anybody even when night fell. No tin of food could be opened without it being covered instantly with a thick layer of writhing insects. One ate them with the food and swallowed them with the water. You might burn them off the walls and ceiling of your dugout at night but another horde would be there in the morning. You washed and shaved with flies about your face and hands and eyes, and even to the most toughened soldier it was horribly apparent that they were often bloated with feeding on the blood of dead animals and men. Mosquito nets were almost unknown, and one of the most valuable possessions a soldier could have was a little piece of muslin veiling, which he could put over his face when he ate or slept. To avoid the flies some of the men learned to write their letters home in the darkness of their dug-outs at night.

From June onwards dysenteric diarrhœa spread through the Army and soon every man was infected by it.[20] Many of the soldiers were able to endure it without reporting sick, but some soon became too weak even to drag themselves to the latrines, and by July, when over a thousand men were being evacuated every week, the disease had become far more destructive than the battle itself. Quite apart from the discomfort and the self-disgust it created an overmastering lassitude. ‘It fills me,’ Hamilton wrote, ‘with a desperate longing to lie down and do nothing but rest… and this, I think, must be the reason the Greeks were ten long years in taking Troy.’

The flies no doubt were principally to blame for the spread of the disease, but the food can scarcely have helped: the salt and fatty bully beef, the absence of all green vegetables. The N.A.A.F.I. stores of later campaigns did not exist at Gallipoli, and there were no means by which the soldiers could buy small luxuries to vary the monotony of their diet. There was a rum ration which was doled out at long intervals, very occasionally they got eggs or perhaps a parcel from home, or even fresh fish (by throwing hand-grenades into the sea) but for the rest it was a monotonous routine of milkless tea, bully beef and plum and apple jam.

The medical services came near to breaking down during this period; they had been organized on the principle that hospitals would be set up on the peninsula soon after the original landing, and when this failed to happen hurried arrangements were made to establish a base under canvas on the island of Lemnos, while the more serious cases were evacuated to Egypt, Malta and even England. Lemnos soon became overwhelmed by the increasing number of casualties and there were never enough hospital ships to cope with the overflow.

And now in June the doctors were faced with this major epidemic of dysentery in the Army. ‘Well, you won’t die of it,’ was the current phrase. But men did die, and the bodies were simply sewn up in blankets and buried in the nearest cemetery. The great majority who survived suffered dreadfully, and perhaps unnecessarily at times. Horse-drawn ambulances bumped down to the beaches with the sick and wounded, and then there would be hours of waiting in the unshaded lighters before they were finally got away. Conditions in the islands were not much better. On Lemnos the patients lay about on the ground in their thick cord breeches and they were pestered by flies. There were no mosquito nets, and often no beds, not even pyjamas.

Trained dentists were unknown at Gallipoli; if a man got toothache, or broke his teeth on the ration biscuits — a thing that happened quite often — he had to put up with it as best he could, unless he was lucky enough to find some hospital orderly who was able to make rough repairs.

These things began to cause a growing resentment in the Army. ‘The men are getting pretty tired,’ Aubrey Herbert wrote. ‘They are not as resigned as their ten thousand brother monks over the way at Mount Athos.’

On June 1 Hamilton had abandoned his cheese-ridden berth aboard the Arcadian and had set up his headquarters on the island of Imbros. But the staff there were hardly better off than anybody else, except that they were not under fire. They had put up their tents on a particularly dreary stretch of coast where there was no shade, and the fine biscuit-coloured sand blew into their faces all day. There existed close by a perfectly good site on level ground among figs and olive trees, but this was deliberately ignored partly because they did not wish to give the camp an air of permanence — the next attack might gain enough ground to allow them to land on the peninsula — and partly because it was felt that the staff should know something of the hardships and miseries of the men at the front. Almost uneatable food was provided to strengthen this illusion. It does not seem to have occurred to the General or any of his senior officers that efficiency mattered more than appearances, and that a man suffering from dysentery — from the flies, the bad food and the heat — was not likely to give his best attention to his work.

And in fact an exasperating muddle began to overtake affairs in the rear areas and along the lines of supply. Most of it was centred on Lemnos and its harbour of Mudros where many of the base installations had been dumped down. Ships arrived without manifests and had to be unloaded before the transport officers could discover what was in them. Often cargoes were sent in the wrong vessels to the wrong places, or became lost or mixed up with other cargoes. New shells arrived without the new keys which were essential to them. Mail disappeared. A polyglot crowd of men in transit hung about the shore waiting for orders. ‘Mingling among them all,’ Admiral Wemyss, the Governor, wrote in his diary,[21] ‘is the wily Greek, avaricious and plausible, making much money out of both of the others (the French and the British) hawking every sort of commodity from onions to Turkish Delight and Beecham’s Pills.’ At the the front someone invented a phrase which expressed the soldiers’ view of the islands. It was ‘Imbros, Mudros and Chaos’.

There was a fantastic difference between the life of the soldiers on shore and that of the sailors in the warships that steamed by, perhaps only a couple of hundred yards out at sea. A ship’s wardroom was a kind of wonderland for any Army officer who was invited on board. After weeks of enduring the flies, and the lice in his clothes, and with his eye still filled with the sight and smell of the decaying dead, he would stand and gaze with astonishment at the clean linen on the table, the glasses, the plates, the meat, the fruit and the wine.

These differences were multiplied still more in the case of the ocean liners which were taken over as transports complete with their peacetime crews and furnishings. Henry Nevinson, the war correspondent, has related that he was aboard the liner Minneapolis just before a major battle was to be fought. He was to go ashore with the attacking troops in the early dawn, and at 4 a.m. he rang for a cup of tea. ‘On this ship,’ the steward informed him, ‘breakfast is always at 8.30.’ A little later when the soldiers were taking to the assault boats the stewards got out their vacuum-cleaners and went to work along the carpets in the corridors in the usual way. Breakfast no doubt was served at eight-thirty, though there were few to eat it, and indeed by that time many of the soldiers were no longer alive.

There was no resentment at all about these things in the Army, for the sailors were known to be eager to get into the fight, and it was a kind of reassurance, a pleasant reminder of the ultimate sanity of life, to have the Navy there with its clean, comfortable ships. ‘It has been computed,’ Wemyss wrote, ‘that in shore fighting it takes several tons of lead to kill one man: at sea one torpedo can cause the death of many hundreds. On shore the soldier is in almost perpetual discomfort, if not misery — at sea the sailor lives in comparative comfort until the moment comes when his life is required of him.’

Yet it seems possible that one can make too much of the hardships of the soldiers at Gallipoli, or rather there is a danger of seeing these hardships out of their right context. With the mere cataloguing of the Army’s miseries a sense of dreariness is transmitted, and this is a false impression; at this stage life on the peninsula was anything but dreary. It was ghastly but it was not yet petty or monotonous. There can be no fair comparison with the relatively comfortable lives of the soldiers in the second world war, or even with the lives of these men themselves before they enlisted. Gallipoli swallowed them up and made conditions of its own. With marvellous rapidity the men removed themselves to another plane of existence, the past receded, the future barely existed, and they lived as never before upon the moment, released from the normal weight of human ambitions and regrets. ‘It was in some ways,’ Herbert says, ‘a curiously happy time.’ It is a strange remark, but one feels one understands it very well. The men had no cinemas, no music, no radios, no ‘entertainment’ of any kind, and they never met women or children as the soldiers did behind the lines in France. Yet the very absence of these pleasures created another scale of values. They had a sharp and enormous appetite for the smallest things. Bathing in the sea became an inexpressible joy. To get away from the flies, to wash the dust from one’s eyes and mouth, to feel cool again: this was a heightening of sensation which, for the moment, went beyond their dreams of home. The brewing of tea in the evening, the sharing out of a parcel, a cake or a bar of chocolate, the long talks in the starlight talking of what they would do ‘when it was all over’—all these things took on an almost mystical emphasis of a kind that became familiar enough in the western desert of Egypt in the second world war, or indeed on any distant front in any war. There were no pin-up girls; no erotic magazines reached them — they were lucky if they even saw a newspaper from home that was under a month old — and there were no nurses or Ensa troupes. Perhaps because of this the sexual instinct seems to have been held in abeyance for the time, or rather it was absorbed in the minutiae of their intensely friendly life, the generous feelings created by the danger all around them. There was very little vice; ordinary crimes became lost in the innocence of the crime of war itself. Certainly there was no possibility of drunkenness,[22] and gambling was not much more than an anaemic pastime in a world where money was the least of things. They craved not soft beds and hot baths but mosquito nets and salt water soap. Promotion counted for a good deal, and so did the word of praise and the medal. General Gouraud, the French commander who had replaced d’Amade, would form his men up in a hollow square in the moonlight and solemnly bestow the Croix de Guerre and the accolade upon some young poilu who, they all knew, had earned these honours only a few days or even a few hours before; and this was much more impressive than any ceremonial in a barracks could have been. They were all keen judges of bravery on that narrow front.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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