Gallipoli

CHAPTER FOUR

THE attack on the Dardanelles could hardly have happened at a worse time for the Turks. In the five months that had elapsed since they had gone to war nothing had gone well with them. In the south Basra, at the head of the Persian Gulf, had fallen to the British, and the expedition into Egypt had ended in a miserable fiasco; a few exhausted and bewildered troops managed to reach the Suez Canal but they were easily driven off and not many of them got back to the oases of Palestine alive.

In the east things were even worse. It was Enver’s notion that Turkey should launch an offensive against Russia in the Caucasus with the Third Army stationed at Erzerum, and he decided to lead the expedition himself. Before leaving for the front he discussed his plan with Liman von Sanders, and the antagonism between the two men seems to have gathered impetus from this moment. Liman pointed out that Enver was proposing to take his troops across the mountains at Sarikamish in mid-winter, when the passes were blocked with snow, and that he had made no arrangements for his lines of supply. All this had no effect whatever upon Enver; he would proceed according to his plan, he said, and after the Russians had been defeated he would advance upon India through Afghanistan. Liman von Sanders has written a sober account of his experiences in Turkey, and he rarely permits himself an emotional expression. This last piece of information, however, undermined his calm. ‘Enver,’ he said, ‘gave utterance to fantastic ideas.’

The details of the battle of Sarikamish, on January 4, 1915, have never been fully known, for there was no one to record them and the news of what had happened was suppressed in Turkey at the time. The official figures, however, reveal that of the ninety thousand Turks who set out on the expedition only twelve thousand returned. The others were killed, captured, died of hunger or were frozen to death. Enver, a sad travesty of the Napoleon he so longed to emulate, abandoned what was left of the army in the field and came back through the winter snow across the Anatolian plain to resume his post at the Ministry of War in Constantinople. Outwardly he remained as calm as ever, and nothing was said about the disaster at Sarikamish or the subsequent outbreak of typhus in the broken army.

There followed in Constantinople a ludicrous attempt to proclaim a Jehad — a Holy War — against all Christians in the Near East (Germans and Austrians excepted), and German missions were sent as far off as Afghanistan to intrigue against the British. But nothing now could disguise the fact that Turkey’s war effort had come to a standstill. The Treasury was empty, the Army’s requisitions of private property were becoming more and more severe, and among civilians there was apathy everywhere. According to Lewis Einstein, the American Minister, the Germans were in some considerable anxiety that at the next blow the Turks might start negotiating in secret for a separate peace.

It was in these low circumstances that the news of the bombardment of the Dardanelles arrived.

In a time of crisis the morale of the civilians in a city which has not yet been touched by war is seldom as high as it is among the soldiers in the frontline; but in March Constantinople excelled itself. In the absence of any reliable information from the Dardanelles rumours began to spread, and they gathered an astonishing virulence as they went along. Forty thousand British soldiers were about to land on the Golden Horn. The women would be raped. The whole city was about to go up in flames.

‘It seems so strange now,’ Henry Morgenthau wrote later on, ‘this conviction in the minds of everybody then — that the success of the Allied Fleets against the Dardanelles was inevitable, and that the capture of Constantinople was a matter of only a few days.’

For two centuries the British Fleet had gone on from one victory to another, it was the one wholly unshakeable power in the world; what hope was there that a handful of old guns on the Dardanelles could hold it back?

In early March the exodus from Constantinople began. The state archives and the gold in the banks were sent to Eski-Shehr, and some attempt was made to bury the more valuable art treasures underground. The first of two special trains, one for the Sultan and his suite, the other for the foreign diplomats, stood ready at Haidar Pasha on the Asiatic shore, and the more well-to-do Turks began to send their wives and families into the interior, by every means they could find.

They were hardly to blame for these precautions, for Talaat himself was utterly despondent. As early as January he had called a conference of Liman von Sanders, Admiral Usedom, the German who was in command of the coastal defences, and Bronsart, the German chief-of-staff of the Army. All had agreed that when the Allied Fleet attacked it would get through. Now in March, Talaat had requisitioned a powerful Mercedes car from the Belgian Legation, and it was packed and equipped with extra petrol tanks, ready for his departure. Since the distance from Gallipoli to Constantinople was only 150 miles it was judged that the first British warships would appear off the Golden Horn within twelve hours of their arrival in the Sea of Marmara.

Among the diplomats too there was much apprehension. The German Embassy, a huge yellow pile of stone, stood on a particularly exposed point at the head of the Bosphorus, and Wangenheim, all his earlier courage gone, was convinced that it would be shelled. He had already deposited some of his baggage with Morgenthau for safe keeping on neutral American ground. ‘Let them dare to destroy that Embassy,’ he exclaimed to Morgenthau one day. ‘I’ll get even with them. If they fire a single shot at it we’ll blow up the French and the British Embassies. Go tell the British Admiral that, won’t you? Tell him also that we have the dynamite ready to do it.’

Wangenheim was in an awkward position. If he retired with the Sultan into the interior of Asia Minor and the Turks signed a peace with the Allies he would be cut off from Germany and the West. For a time he had tried to persuade Talaat to move the government to Adrianople, whence he would have an opportunity of escaping across the Bulgarian border; but Talaat had refused on the grounds that it was more than likely that Bulgaria would attack Turkey once Constantinople fell.

Next Bedri, the Chief of Police, came to Morgenthau to arrange for the departure of the American Embassy. Morgenthau told him that he was not going to move, and suggested instead that they should draw up a map of the city showing the areas which were likely to be bombarded. It was agreed that the two ammunition factories, the powder mills, the offices of War and Marine, the telegraph office, the railway stations and a number of other public buildings were all legitimate targets. These were marked off, and Morgenthau telegraphed the State Department in Washington with a request that the British and French should be approached and asked to spare the other purely residential districts.

This plan, however, was hardly more than a straw in the wind, for the more ruthless of the Young Turks had already made their own arrangements for destroying the city rather than let the Allies have it. If they themselves had to go then all should go. They cared nothing for the Christian relics of Byzantium, and regarded patriotism as a higher thing than the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people who lived in the tumbledown wooden houses in Galata and Stamboul and along the Golden Horn. If one did not remember the burning of Moscow by the Russians after Borodino, and Hitler’s last days in Berlin, it would be difficult to credit the arrangements that were now made. Petrol and other inflammable material were stored in the police stations. St. Sophia and other public buildings were made ready for dynamiting.

Morgenthau pleaded for St. Sophia at least, but Talaat answered him, ‘There are not six men in the Committee of Union and Progress who care for anything that is old. We all like new things.’

The truth was that by March the Young Turks had something to fear which was even worse than the approach of the Allied Fleet. Placards had begun to appear in the streets denouncing their government. With every day that went by it became more evident that a great part of the population — and not only the Greeks and the Armenians — looked upon the arrival of the Allied warships, not as a defeat but as a liberation. Bedri was able to do something to check this increasing unrest by deporting a number of men whom he judged to be dangerous, but it was perfectly clear that rioting would break out directly the British and French ships appeared.

For the rest, all was concealed muddle and a silent confusion. Outwardly the city was quiet and normal, inwardly it was possessed by a coma of suspense. The shops were open, the government departments at work; but everyone, with divided hopes and different fears, had fixed his attention on the Dardanelles, and even the great mass of minor people who aspire to nothing but their own safety and who submerge their imaginations in the routine of their daily lives were eager for the latest rumour, the least scrap of information from the front.

It was that ominous quietness that precedes a riot. Everywhere in Constantinople soldiers were marching about or standing at the street corners, and they had that curious appearance of aimlessness, of menace that has not yet quite decided upon its target, that seems to overtake armed forces in a city when the officers have no orders, when nothing certain is known and each new rumour cancels out the last. The Goeben made ready to steam out into the Black Sea before the Queen Elizabeth arrived.

‘These precautions,’ Liman remarks dryly, ‘were justified.’ Turkish General Headquarters, he says, were convinced that the Fleet would break through, and meanwhile the orders issued by Enver for the disposition of the troops along the Dardanelles were such that a successful defence against an Allied landing there would have been impossible. ‘Had these orders been carried out,’ Liman goes on, ‘the course of the world war would have been given sucha turn in the spring of 1915 that Germany and Austria would have had to continue the struggle without Turkey.’

Meanwhile at the Narrows in the Dardanelles, the last obstacle between the Fleet and the Sea of Marmara, the Turkish and German gunners were reaching the end of their resources. Up to March 18 they had been able to hold their own, and in the excitement of the struggle they had come to regard with almost a casual air the slim dark silhouettes of the battleships which appeared each day so clearly before them at the southern approaches to the straits. Soon they knew all the names: ‘There’s the Agamemnon; there’s the Elizabeth,’ and they longed only for the ships to come within range so that they could begin to shoot. But each day drained away a little more of their energy and their ability to fight. The massed attack of March 18 had been a devastating thing. By midnight, just as Keyes had guessed, they had reached a point of crisis.

Their courage had not gone — it had been a tremendous thing to see the enemy battleships go down, and in all the day’s fighting they had suffered only 118 casualties — but half their ammunition had been fired away, and there was no possibility of getting any more. In particular the heavy guns had been left with less than thirty armour-piercing shells, which alone had power to destroy the battleships. When these were gone it was simply a question of how long the lighter guns and howitzers could keep the minesweepers off the minefields; some thought one day, others two. The mines themselves offered no particular difficulty once the guns were dominated; there were 324 of them arranged in ten lines, but they were spaced ninety yards apart, many of them were old, and after six months in the water had broken from their moorings and drifted away.[4] Apart from another thirty-six mines which had not yet been put into the water there was no other reserve, and it was now quite possible for the British to sweep a channel through to the Sea of Marmara in a matter of hours. Beyond the Narrows there were no other defences of any kind to impede the battleships, except a few old guns which were aimed the wrong way.

The Narrows on this night presented an appearance that was not unlike the scenes that followed the air raids in the second world war. Chanak, a town of 16,000 people, was now very largely deserted and in ruins. Fires had started during the bombardment and although they had died down after nightfall rubble still blocked the streets and the quays. Everywhere around the forts shell craters had broken up the ground, and at the Dardanos, a little further downstream on the Asiatic shore, the hillsides were pitted and scarred like the surface of the moon. Coins and pieces of pottery which had lain in the earth since classical times had been flung up into the air. Only eight of the heavy cannon had been put out of action, but there was much serious damage in the emplacements, and soldiers worked throughout the night rebuilding the parapets, repairing the telephone lines and righting the guns which had jammed and had shifted their position among the falling debris.

The behaviour of the soldiers throughout the long seven hours’ bombardment had been admirable. Those who watched the Turkish gunners at Kilid Bahr on the Gallipoli side of the straits say that they fought with a wild fanaticism, an Imam chanting prayers to them as they ran to their work on the gun emplacements. This was something more than the usual excitement of battle; the men were possessed, apparently, with a religious fervour, a kind of frenzy against the attacking infidel. And so they exposed themselves quite indifferently to the flying shrapnel and the bursting shells.

The Germans at Hamidieh Fort and the other batteries on the opposite bank displayed a different kind of courage. Many of these men were gunners who had been taken off the Goeben and the Breslau, and so they had the precise and technical discipline of the sea. In addition they had improvised with great skill. In the absence of motor transport and horses they had requisitioned teams of buffaloes to drag their mobile howitzers from place to place, so that the British could never find the range. Field guns were sited on the skyline in such a way as to create the maximum of optical illusion. They had too a primitive but effective device by which black puffs of smoke were made to emerge out of pieces of piping each time the guns fired, and this had drawn some scores of British and French shells away from the batteries.

But none of these makeshifts, nor the discipline and the fanaticism of the defenders, could alter the fact that they had so much ammunition and no more. So long as it lasted they were quite confident that they could keep the Fleet at bay — and probably this confidence governed every other feeling at this high point of the attack. But if the battle went on and no unforeseen reinforcements arrived it was obvious to the commanders that the moment would come when they would be bound to order their men to fire off the last round and then retire. After that they could do no more.

They were convinced that the Fleet would attack again on the following day. They knew nothing of the alarming mystery which had been created among the British and the French by the loss of the Bouvet, the Irresistible and the Ocean. This was a matter which the Germans and the Turks could have explained in two minutes. What had happened was that on the night of March 8 a Lieut.-Colonel Geehl, who was a Turkish mine expert, had taken a small steamer called the Nousret down into Eren Keui Bay and there, parallel to the Asiatic shore and just inside the slack water, he had laid a new line of twenty mines. He did this because he had seen British warships manœuvring there during the previous day. Somehow in the ten days before the March 18 attack the British minesweepers had never found these mines; three of them, it is true, had been swept up, but it was not realized that there was a whole line of them; nor had they been noticed by the British aerial reconnaissance. For these ten days the destiny of the Fleet and much else besides had been lying quietly there in the clear water.

To the Turks and the Germans it hardly seemed likely that the enemy warships would make this mistake a second time. And so through this night of March 18 they worked and waited for what the morning would bring, not over-elated by the success of the day or indifferent to their danger, but simply determined to fight on.

The British knew nothing of all this — of the plight of the gunners at the Narrows or of the preparations which the Turkish government was making to abandon Constantinople. A few of the leaders like Keyes at the Dardanelles and Churchill in London might have divined that they had now come up to the crisis of the battle, but they had nothing definite to go on, they simply felt the presence of victory very near at hand. The others felt nothing of the kind. And in fact, through all these weeks while the bombardment had been going on, the old misgivings about the whole adventure had been revived in London. It was not that the commanders wanted to abandon it; they were eager to push on and believed that it could be made to succeed. But it was increasingly felt, at first at the Admiralty and then in the War Office, that the Navy would not be able to do the job alone. Somehow an army would have to be provided.

As early as February, before ever Carden had begun the bombardment, Venizelos, the Greek Prime Minister, had been privately approached over the matter. As an inducement for Greece to come in on the side of the Allies he was offered two divisions, one British and one French, to stiffen his northern flank at Salonika. Venizelos judged that this reinforcement would be just enough to bring his enemies down on top of him and not enough to hold them off, and he therefore declined the offer. At the end of February however he changed his mind. Carden’s bombardment was going very well and it looked as though he might be in the Sea of Marmara at any moment. On March 1 the Greeks offered to send a force of three divisions to occupy the Gallipoli peninsula and then advance, if possible, upon Constantinople.

There is a fatuity about the negotiations which followed that still has power to cause surprise across the gulf of two world wars. It was to everybody’s interest — Russia’s more than anyone’s — that Greece should come in with her army and buttress the Fleet at the critical moment; yet the arrangements that were now made were precisely calculated to keep her out and almost lose her allegiance altogether. Britain and France would have accepted the Greek offer at once. But to Russia it was a matter of great alarm. It revived all her old fears about the guardianship of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, her one vital outlet to the south. She by no means wished to have the Greeks in Constantinople when she might be there herself. Blind to the fact that his own military situation was desperate, and that the revolution and his own death were not far off, the Czar permitted himself to say to the British Ambassador on March 3 that in no circumstances would he see Greek soldiers in Constantinople. In particular, King Constantine was not to appear there.

When this news reached Athens the Venizelos Government fell and was replaced on March 7 by a new ministry of pro-German views. Britain and France meanwhile, with an eye to bolstering Russia’s morale, informed the Czar that he should have control of the Bosphorus as soon as Constantinople fell, and an agreement to that effect was signed in the middle of March. With this all the Navy’s hopes of getting an army quickly into the Gallipoli peninsula were gone. It remained to be seen what could be done by Britain and France.

In London the chief advocate for an army for Gallipoli was Lord Fisher. ‘The Dardanelles,’ he cried in a note to Lloyd George, ‘Futile without soldiers!’ and he remarked very sensibly, ‘Somebody will have to land at Gallipoli some time or other.’ The decision on this matter, however, did not rest with the Admiralty; it rested with Kitchener, and Kitchener had been saying all along that he had no soldiers to spare. In point of fact he did have soldiers who were not then employed — notably the 29th Division, which was a very fine unit of the regular Army standing idle in England. Through February a lively argument developed between the western front generals and the supporters of the Dardanelles scheme as to who should get possession of this valuable force. By the middle of the month Kitchener was coming round to the Dardanelles side, and on the 16th he announced that the division could sail for the Ægean. It would assist the marines already on the spot in mopping up the Gallipoli peninsula, and later in occupying Constantinople. This brought so sharp a protest from the generals in Prance that on February 18, the day before the naval bombardment began, the Field Marshal revoked his decision and said that the Australian and New Zealand divisions then in Egypt should go instead. At this the ships which the Admiralty had assembled for the transport of the 29th Division were dispersed.

But now a new factor came into the scene. General Sir William Birdwood was sent out to the Dardanelles to report on the military position there, and one of his earliest messages to Kitchener on March 5 was disturbing. He did not believe, Birdwood said, that the Fleet would get through by itself; the Army would have to come in.

One sympathizes with Kitchener, for the situation was complicated. At one moment he is offered a Greek army and at the next it is snatched away. On March 2 Garden says he can get through. On March 5 Birdwood says he cannot. Nobody at this stage, not even Carden who is ill or Fisher who dislikes the whole design, suggests that the operations should be abandoned. As Churchill wrote later, ‘Everybody’s blood was up’: the excitement of a naval battle, the sudden vision of spectacular success it had conjured up, the historic ground, the daring of the enterprise — all these things had captivated people’s minds, and Kitchener himself at last fell under the Gallipoli spell. On March 10 he announced that the 29th Division was to go after all, and that he had arranged for the French to send a division as well. This meant that, with the Anzac divisions, there would be an Army Corps of some seventy thousand men in the field.

No one knew yet what this large force was to do or precisely where it was to go, or what allies and enemies it would gather on its way. Despite Birdwood’s report it was still thought that the Navy would break through alone, and still no one suggested that it should suspend its operations until the Army arrived so that the two forces could attack together.

Something of the confusion and the vagueness — the remarkable blending of precipitancy and hesitation — that governed the situation in London at this time can be glimpsed from the circumstances in which General Ian Hamilton, an old comrade of Kitchener’s from the South African war, was appointed to command this new army that had drifted into being. It was on the morning of March 12 that Hamilton was told of his appointment. He himself has described the scene:

‘I was working at the Horse Guards when about 10 a.m. K. sent for me. I wondered. Opening the door I bade him good morning and walked up to his desk where he went on writing like a graven image. After a moment, he looked up and said in a matter-of-fact tone, “We are sending a military force to support the Fleet now at the Dardanelles, and you are to have command… ”

‘K., after his one tremendous remark, had resumed his writing at the desk. At last, he looked up and inquired, “Well?”

‘ “We have done this sort of thing before, Lord K.,” I said; “We have run this sort of show before and you know without saying I am most deeply grateful and you know without saying that I will do my best and that you can trust my loyalty — but I must say something — I must ask you some questions.” Then I began.

‘K. frowned; shrugged his shoulders; I thought he was going to be impatient, but although he gave curt answers at first he slowly broadened out, until at the end no one else could get a word in edgeways.’

Lord Kitchener, however, was not able to be very explicit, for until the Navy had launched its attack on March 18 neither he nor anybody else had any clear notion of what Hamilton was to do. General Caldwell, the Director of Military Operations, was called in and although he was able to produce a map of the Gallipoli area (which subsequently turned out to be quite inaccurate), the sum of his knowledge of the situation appeared to be confined to a plan for a landing on the southern part of the Gallipoli peninsula which had been worked out by the Greek General Staff some months before. The Greeks, Caldwell said, had estimated that they would require 150,000 men.

Kitchener dismissed this idea at once. Half that number, he said, would do Hamilton handsomely. The Turks were so weak on the peninsula that if a British submarine managed to get through the Narrows and wave the Union Jack outside the town of Gallipoli the whole enemy garrison would take to its heels and make a beeline for Bulair.

At this point General Wolfe Murray, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and General Archibald Murray, the Inspector of Home Forces, came into the room together with General Braithwaite, who had been appointed Hamilton’s chief-of-staff. None of them had heard of this plan for a Gallipoli campaign before and the Murrays were so taken aback that neither of them ventured to comment.

However, Braithwaite spoke. According to Hamilton: ‘He only said one thing to K. and that produced an explosion. He said it was vital that we should have a better air service than the Turks in case it came to fighting over a small area like the Gallipoli peninsula; he begged, therefore, that whatever else we got, or did not get, we might be fitted out with a contingent of up-to-date aeroplanes, pilots and observers. K. turned on him with flashing spectacles, and rent him with the words, “Not one”.’[5]

Returning to the War Office next morning Hamilton found Kitchener ‘standing at his desk splashing about with his pen at three different drafts of instructions’. There were but three or four essential points in the document that finally emerged; Hamilton was to hold back his troops until the Fleet had made its full-scale attack on the forts at the Narrows. If this attempt failed he was to land on the Gallipoli peninsula; if it succeeded he was to hold the peninsula with a light garrison and advance directly upon Constantinople, where it was hoped he would be joined by a Russian corps which would be landed on the Bosphorus.

In no circumstances was Hamilton to proceed until his whole force was assembled and he was not to fight on the Asiatic side of the Dardanelles.

‘He toiled over the wording of his instructions,’ Hamilton says in his diary. ‘They were headed “Constantinople Expeditionary Force”. I begged him to alter this to avert Fate’s evil eye. He consented and both this corrected draft and the copy as finally approved are now in Braithwaite’s dispatch box more modestly headed “Mediterranean Expeditionary Force”. None of the drafts helps us with facts about the enemy; the politics; the country, and our allies, the Russians. In sober fact these “instructions” leave me to my own devices in the East.

‘So I said good-bye to old K. as casually as if we were to meet together at dinner. Actually my heart went out to my old chief. He was giving me the best thing in his gift and I hated to leave him among people who were frightened of him. But there was no use saying a word. He did not even wish me luck and I did not expect him to, but he did say, rather unexpectedly, after I had said good-bye and just as I was taking up my cap from the table, “If the Fleet gets through, Constantinople will fall of itself and you will have won, not a battle, but the war”.’

By now there had been assembled some thirteen officers who were to act on Hamilton’s staff. Most of these were regular soldiers, but there were one or two who, Hamilton says, had hastily put on uniform for the first time in their lives: ‘Leggings awry, spurs upside down, belts over shoulder straps! I haven’t a notion of who they all are.’ Others again who were to handle the administration and quartermastering of the headquarters he failed to meet at all, since they had not heard of their appointments as yet.

However, the paramount need now was haste, and at 5 p.m. on Friday, March 13, the party, armed with the instructions, the inaccurate map, a three-years-old handbook on the Turkish Army and a pre-war report on the Dardanelles defences, proceeded to Charing Cross station. Churchill, who had been pressing strongly for their immediate departure, had made all the arrangements; a special train was waiting to take them to Dover where they were to cross to Calais on H.M.S. Foresight. At Calais another special express would take them through the night to Marseilles, where H.M.S. Phaeton, a 30-knot unarmoured cruiser, was commissioned to convey them to the Dardanelles.

Churchill himself with his wife came down to Charing Cross to see the party off, and there was some last minute conversation on the subject of Hamilton’s reports from the front. They would all have to go directly to Kitchener, Hamilton said; to address Churchill separately at the Admiralty would be disloyal. With that he was off. As the train drew out Hamilton said to Captain Aspinall, the young officer who was to plan the operations, ‘This is going to be an unlucky show. I kissed my wife through her veil.’ Four days later the party was at the Dardanelles.

They were just in time. Next day, March 18, Hamilton watched the assault on the Narrows from the decks of the Phaeton.

So now at midnight they were all gathered in the arena: the Turks and the Germans at the Narrows preparing to make a desperate stand, the British and French sailors with their battered but still powerful fleet, and the new Allied Commander-in-Chief who had arrived without an army and without a plan.

Having satisfied himself that both the Ocean and the Irresistible were safe from the Turks at the bottom of the sea, Keyes on the night of March 18 went directly in the Jed to the Queen Elizabeth to see de Robeck. He was astonished to find the Admiral much upset. He was sure, de Robeck said, that because of his losses he would be dismissed from the command on the following day. Keyes answered with some spirit that de Robeck had judged the situation quite wrongly: Churchill would not be discouraged. He would send reinforcements at once and back them up in every way. Apart from the 639 men drowned in the Bouvet, the casualties had been amazingly small: not seventy men in the entire Fleet. All three lost battleships were old vessels due for scrap, and even if the Gaulois and the Inflexible were withdrawn for repairs the great power of the Fleet was substantially intact.

For a time the two officers discussed the problem of the mines, and it was agreed that they should immediately set about organizing a new force to deal with them. The civilian crews of the trawlers would be sent home, and volunteers from the lost battleships would take their place. Destroyers would be equipped with sweeping apparatus, and at the next attempt an attack would be finally driven home.

On this encouraging note the Admiral and his chief-of-staff finally went to their cabins for a few hours’ rest.

Keyes rose next morning, March 19, and having shaved, as was his custom, with a copy of Kipling’s ‘If’ propped up before him, went out to survey the condition of the Fleet, which had spent the night sheltering about Tenedos. It was clear that a day or two must elapse before the attack could be resumed — the wind was again rising to a gale and there was much to be done in organizing the new minesweeping force — but everywhere the captains and the crews were eager to renew the fight.

In the course of the morning a message arrived from the Admiralty condoling with de Robeck over his setback but urging him to press on with the attack.

His losses were to be made good by four more battleships — the Queen, Implacable, London and Prince of Wales—which would sail at once. In addition the French Ministry of Marine was replacing the Bouvet with the Henri IV.

The damage to the French squadron had been severe: Gaulois had been forced to ground herself on Rabbit Island to the north of Tenedos, and the Suffren was leaking from the effects of a plunging shell. The Gaulois, however, was soon pumped out and refloated, and with the Inflexible and the Suffren she went off to Malta for repairs. Meanwhile the organization of the new minesweeping force began. One hundred and fifteen men from the trawler crews were sent home and there was an overwhelming response from the crews of the Ocean and the Irresistible for volunteers to replace them. Kites, wire mesh, and other tackle were ordered from Malta, and at Tenedos Greek fishermen were engaged to help the British crews in equipping the destroyers as minesweepers. All day in heavy seas this work was pressed forward, and on March 20 de Robeck was able to report to the Admiralty that fifty British and twelve French minesweepers, all manned by volunteers, would soon be available. Steel nets would be laid across the straits to deal with floating mines when the attack was renewed. ‘It is hoped,’ he added, ‘to be in a position to commence operations in three or four days.’

Now too an efficient squadron of aircraft under the command of Air Commodore Samson began to arrive. With this the Navy hoped greatly to improve their spotting of the enemy guns.

De Robeck also wrote to Hamilton, who had gone to Lemnos to inspect the 2,000 marines and the 4,000 Australian and New Zealand soldiers who had already arrived there. He urged Hamilton not to take these troops back to Egypt for re-grouping as he proposed to do, since it might create a bad impression in the Balkans just at the moment when the Navy was about to resume its attack. ‘We are all getting ready for another go,’ he said, ‘and not in the least beaten or down-hearted.’

Hamilton did not share this confidence. He had been deeply moved by what he had seen of the battle on March 18, and perhaps he was affected by the sight of the damaged Inflexible creeping back to Tenedos. Perhaps he was influenced by Birdwood, who from the beginning had never believed that the Fleet could do the job alone. Other considerations — even a simple chivalrous desire to help the Navy — may have weighed with him; but at all events he sent the following message to Kitchener on March 19:

‘I am most reluctantly driven to the conclusion that the straits are not likely to be forced by battleships, as at one time seemed probable, and that, if my troops are to take part, it will not take the subsidiary form anticipated. The Army’s part will be more than mere landing parties to destroy forts; it must be a deliberate and prepared military operation, carried out at full strength, so as to open a passage for the Navy.’

Kitchener had replied with surprising energy: ‘You know my view, that the Dardanelles must be forced, and that if large military operations on the Gallipoli peninsula by your troops are necessary to clear the way, those operations must be undertaken, after careful consideration of the local defences, and must be carried through.’

This then was the situation on March 21—a Naval Command that believes that the Fleet can still get through alone, and an Army Command convinced that it cannot.

The following morning, March 22, de Robeck decided to take the Queen Elizabeth over to Lemnos for a conference with Hamilton. There is something of a mystery about this meeting, for none of the subsequent accounts of what took place are in agreement with each other. Keyes was occupied with the arrangements for the new naval attack and was not present, but he assures us that he believed that nothing more than future military movements were to be discussed. Those who assembled in the Queen Elizabeth were Hamilton, Birdwood and Braithwaite from the Army, and De Robeck and Wemyss from the Navy.

Hamilton’s version is as follows: ‘The moment he sat down de Robeck told us that he was now quite clear he could not get through without the help of all my troops. Before ever we went on board, Braithwaite, Birdwood and I agreed that, whatever we landsmen might think, we must leave the seamen to settle their own job, saying nothing for or against the land operations or amphibious operations until the sailors themselves turned to us and said that they had abandoned the idea of forcing the straits by naval operations alone. They have done so. The fat (that is us) is fairly in the fire.

‘No doubt we had our views. Birdie (Birdwood) and my own staff disliked the idea of chancing mines with million pound ships. The hesitants who always make hay in foul weather had been extra active since the sinking of the three men-of-war. Suppose the Fleet could get through with the loss of another battleship or two — how the devil would our troopships be able to follow? And the store ships? And the colliers?

‘This had made me turn contrary. During the battle I had cabled that the chances of the Navy pushing through on their own were hardly fair fighting chances, but since then de Robeck, the man who should know, had twice said that he did think that there was a fair fighting chance. Had he stuck to that opinion at the conference, then I was ready, as a soldier, to make light of military croaks about troopships. Constantinople must surrender, revolute or scuttle within a very few hours of our battleships entering the Marmara. Memories of one or two obsolete six-inchers at Ladysmith helped me to feel as Constantinople would feel when her rail and sea communications were cut and a rain of shell fell upon the penned-in populace from de Robeck’s terrific batteries. Given a good wind that nest of iniquity would go up like Sodom and Gomorrah in a winding sheet of flame.

‘But once the Admiral said his battleships could not fight through without help, there was no foothold left for the views of a landsman.

‘So there was no discussion. We at once turned our faces to the land scheme.’

This account does not square with what Keyes knew of de Robeck’s views up to the time of this meeting; and it does not square with a message the Admiral sent to London after the meeting was over.

‘I do not hold the check on 18th decisive,’ he wrote, ‘but, having met General Hamilton on 22nd and heard his proposals, I now consider a combined operation essential to obtain great results and object of campaign… To attack Narrows now with Fleet would be a mistake, as it would jeopardize the execution of a better and bigger scheme.’

In other words, it is only after he has heard Hamilton’s proposals that he decides to abandon the naval attack.

Whatever may be the truth of this matter — whether Hamilton enticed de Robeck away from the naval attack or whether de Robeck himself suggested that the Army should come in and help — the important thing is that on March 22 the Admiral changed his mind; nothing more was now to be done by the Fleet until the Army, now scattered along the Mediterranean, was assembled and ready to land.

One can perhaps glimpse something of what was going on in de Robeck’s mind. The wounds of March 18 were beginning to stiffen and hurt. To sailors of de Robeck’s generation it was an appalling thing to lose battleships, no matter how old and out of date they were. Most of their lives had been spent on these decks; these ships had been their home, and through the years they had developed for them not only affection but pride as well. The whole tradition of the Navy was that the ship was more important than the man: no matter what the cost in lives the captain must always try to save his ship. And now in a few hours three of the largest vessels of the Fleet with their famous names had gone to the bottom.

Then again de Robeck was perfectly aware of Fisher’s opposition to the Dardanelles adventure. For the moment Churchill might be holding the old Admiral in line, but young and enthusiastic First Lords did not last for ever. Fisher stood for the Navy, its permanence and its traditions, and he was a formidable man. He had said all along that the Fleet was not likely to get through without the aid of the Army, and now here were three sunken battleships to prove his point. Suppose another three ships were lost when the attack was renewed? It could very easily happen. What was Fisher going to say to that?

There was one other point. De Robeck had very much Hoped that once he was in the Marmara Hamilton would land at Bulair on the neck of the peninsula, and that the Turkish Army, finding itself cut off, would surrender. Thus there would no longer be any threat to the lifeline of the Fleet through the Dardanelles. But at the meeting Hamilton had announced that it could not be done. He had been up to Bulair himself aboard the Phaeton, and had seen the network of entrenchments there. Hamilton now proposed that he should land instead at the tip of the peninsula and fight his way up it. This altered the Fleet’s situation entirely. It meant that there would be no sudden collapse of the Turks; they would continue to hold the Narrows and threaten the supply ships coming through. It was true that from the Marmara the Fleet could attack the Turkish forts from the rear. But how long would it take to destroy them? How long could the Fleet remain isolated in the Marmara without coal and ammunition; and with the Goeben still intact? A fortnight? Three weeks?

There were of course grave dangers in delaying the renewal of the naval attack until the Army was ready. With every day that went by the Turks were recovering from the bombardment of the 18th, and one had only to look at the new entrenchments that appeared every morning on the cliffs to know that reinforcements were arriving. Well then, how much delay would there be? Hamilton thought it would be about three weeks before he was ready. Had Kitchener allowed the 29th Division to sail at the beginning of February as he had originally intended, the troops would be here now, and it would have been a very different story. But the 29th was still at sea, far down the other end of the Mediterranean,[6] and Hamilton did not believe he could attack without them — and in fact Kitchener had expressly forbidden him to do so.

Birdwood disagreed with Hamilton over this. He said that it might be worth while taking a chance and landing there and then with whatever forces they could scrape together at Lemnos. But on going into the matter it was found that every sort of equipment from guns to landing craft was missing. Moreover, the transports coming out from England had been stowed in the wildest confusion: horses in one ship, harness in another: guns had been packed without their limbers and isolated from their ammunition. Nobody in England had been able to make up their minds as to whether or not there were roads on the Gallipoli peninsula, and so a number of useless lorries had been put on board. To have landed on hostile beaches in these conditions would have been a hazardous thing. Nor were there any facilities for repacking the ships at Lemnos. So now there was nothing for it but to take everything back to Alexandria in Egypt, and there re-group the whole force and its equipment in some sort of battle order. Provided his administrative staff arrived in good time, Hamilton judged that the Army might be ready to land on Gallipoli somewhere about the middle of April — say, April 14. Then the Army and the Navy could attack together.

Upon this the meeting of March 22 broke up.

Keyes was appalled when he got back to the Queen Elizabeth and heard the news. He pleaded with de Robeck not to change his plans. The new minesweeping force, he said, would clear all their difficulties away, and they were bound to get through. To delay for the Army would be fatal.

De Robeck was still uneasy in his mind and he agreed to see Hamilton again. In the afternoon the two sailors went across to the Franconia where the General was living and Keyes set out his arguments again. He was asked when his minesweepers would be ready, and he replied that it would be in about a fortnight’s time: April 3 or April 4. De Robeck then pointed out that since Hamilton would be ready on April 14 this only meant a delay of ten days. ‘So,’ says Keyes, ‘the matter was finally settled.’ He adds, ‘I must confess I was fearfully disappointed and unhappy.’

To this theme Keyes returned again and again in later days, and it finally emerges in an unrepentant counter blast in the memoirs he published in 1934: ‘I wish to place on record that I had no doubt then, and have no doubt now — and nothing will ever shake my opinion — that from the 4th of April onwards the Fleet could have forced the straits and, with losses trifling compared with those the Army suffered, could have entered the Marmara with sufficient force to destroy the Turco-German Fleet.’

By 1934 Keyes was an Admiral of the Fleet and a great man in the world, with a fighting record that put him almost in the Nelson class. But in 1915 he was no more than an exceptionally promising young commodore, and he was no match for the steady conservatism of the Navy personified by de Robeck. De Robeck was no weakling — he was a kindly, firm, courageous and fair-minded man — but he had had his training and he was the one who bore the responsibility. That sudden flash of inspiration that will sometimes transport a commander past all the accepted rules of warfare into a field of daring that carries everything before it was perhaps lacking in the Admiral’s character, but he can hardly be blamed for that. His ‘no’ was a definite no; it only remained now to learn how London would view this change of plan.

Churchill says he heard the news with consternation. He told the Dardanelles Commission later: ‘I regarded it (the battle of March 18) as only the first of several days’ fighting, though the loss in ships sunk or disabled was unpleasant. It never occurred to me for a moment that we should not go on, within the limits of what we had decided to risk, till we had reached a decision one way or another. I found Lord Fisher and Sir Arthur Wilson in the same mood. Both met me that morning (March 19) with expressions of firm determination to fight it out.’

But now, on March 23, Churchill has a telegram from de Robeck saying that he will not move without the Army, and not for another three weeks. At once — and one can imagine with what pugnacity — Churchill sat down and drafted a telegram ordering the Admiral to ‘renew the attack begun on March 18 at the first favourable opportunity’. Then, convening a meeting of Fisher and the War Group at the Admiralty, he placed the telegram before them for their approval.

Describing this meeting, Churchill says: ‘For the first time since the war began, high words were used around the octagonal table.’ To Fisher and the other admirals it seemed that with de Robeck’s telegram the situation at the Dardanelles had entirely altered. They had been willing, they said, to support the purely naval attack so long as the admiral on the spot had recommended it. But now both de Robeck and Hamilton had turned against it. They knew the difficulties; they had the responsibility. To force them to attack against their own judgment would be entirely wrong.

Churchill could make no headway against these views though he appears to have argued with great energy that morning. When finally the meeting broke up without a decision he still persisted in his opinion. But it was evident that he was defeated. Asquith said that he agreed with Churchill, but he would not give the order against the advice of the admirals. De Robeck in a further exchange of telegrams proved immovable. At the Dardanelles the bad weather continued, and Hamilton went off with his staff to Egypt. In London Kitchener informed the War Council that the Army was now quite willing to take over from the Navy the task of opening the straits. With this there was nothing more to be said, and Churchill gave up at last. With good grace he sent off a message to de Robeck saying that his new plans had been approved.

A silence now settled on the Gallipoli peninsula: no ship entered the straits, no gun was fired. The Fleet lay at anchor in the islands. The first part of the great adventure was over.