Gallipoli

CHAPTER TEN

DURING the first few weeks of the campaign the wildest rumours went about Constantinople; ten thousand British were said to have been killed at the landing, and another thirty thousand taken prisoner. At one moment the Allies were reported to be advancing on the city and at the next they had been driven into the sea. Once again there was talk of special trains that were to evacuate the Government into the interior, of bombardments and of riots. Yet it was not quite the same ferment, the near panic, that had followed the naval attack on the Narrows in March. The Allied Fleet then had been feared in much the same way as the Air Force bombers were feared at the start of the second world war, but a military campaign on land was something that everyone could understand, a slower and a more familiar thing; there was no question of the capital being demolished overnight.

Enver took a firm line from the outset; he announced flatly that the Allies were already defeated, and to celebrate the event there was a ceremony at St. Sophia at which the Sultan was invested with the tide of El Ghazi, the Conqueror, the driver of the Allies into the sea. Flags were hung out in all the principal streets and public squares.

It is doubtful if anyone was much impressed by this, but by the end of the first week in May it was clear at least that the invading army was not making much headway. An apathetic quiet settled on the streets, and the city began to accustom itself to the suspense, the misery and the occasional shocks of a long campaign. Presently the old familiar signs of war began to appear: the conscripts marching through the streets in their shabby field grey uniforms and pyramidal hats, the Army communiqués that announced yesterday’s victory all over again, the ferocious newspaper articles, the flags and the parades, the spy hunt and the renewed outburst of official xenophobia.

Once again the foreign minorities, the Armenians and the Greeks, went underground with their thoughts and, where they could, their belongings. Bedri, the Chief of Police, pursued them as persistently as he could, issuing worthless receipts for the goods he seized from their shops and houses, and extracting money by the simple process of keeping people in gaol until they bought themselves out. One day his men swooped on the Bon Marché and carried off all the boxes of toy soldiers in the shop on the ground that they had been manufactured in France.

After the first rush on the banks and the stores there was the usual shortage of coal and petrol. ‘The bazaar is dead,’ one of the foreign diplomats wrote in his diary. ‘Nothing is bought or sold.’ The Germans, meanwhile, managed to exercise a censorship on news since they controlled the newsprint that was imported into the country and issued it only to those newspapers which took a line that was strongly favourable to Germany.

For the rest, however, the rhythm of the city was not much changed, and travellers arriving there on the Orient Express were astonished at how normal it all was. The lights went on at night, the Pera Palace Hotel was open, the restaurants appeared to have plenty of food, and for the rich at least the war continued to rumble somewhere in the distance, unseen and only faintly heard like a far-off summer thunderstorm which yet might blow itself away. Even the bombardments of the Bosphorus by the Russian Black Sea Fleet caused very little alarm, for they were hit-and-run affairs and soon ceased altogether. At the international club where the foreign diplomats gathered Talaat was often to be seen serenely playing poker far into the night, and Enver continued to be very confident. He liked to show his visitors his latest trophy from the Dardanelles: an unexploded shell from the Queen Elizabeth mounted on a Byzantine column in his palace garden.

Wangenheim was a masterful figure in Constantinople during these weeks. He would come into the Club in the evening, huge, garrulous and assured, and when the other diplomats gathered round him he would retail the latest news from Potsdam: another 100,000 Russian prisoners taken, a break in the French line on the Marne, another British cruiser sunk in the North Sea. It was known that he had a wireless station attached to his Embassy, and was in direct touch with Berlin, if not with the Kaiser himself.

The other members of the Club were in no position to deny or check any of Wangenheim’s stories; they had no wireless stations of their own and the Turkish newspapers told, them nothing that they could believe. Without Wangenheim’s daily bulletins they were forced to fall back on the small change of local gossip. The surprising thing about this gossip is not that it should have been so cynical, so entertaining and so futile in itself, but that it was so very nearly accurate. Thus someone would report that his doorman — or his cook or his butler — had positive information that the Italian Ambassadress had booked sleepers on the Orient Express; and this surely was a firm sign that Italy was about to declare war at last. Or again it would be some devious story of how Enver had quarrelled again with Liman von Sanders and was about to replace him at the front. There was much talk of peace: the Germans, it was said, had made a secret approach to Russia offering her Constantinople if she would abandon the Allies. Bulgaria, with her army of 600,000 men and her traditional hatred of Turkey was, naturally, very much on their minds, and there was a flurry in the foreign colony when it was learned that the Bulgarian students at the Robert College outside Constantinople had been recalled home by their Government. This, they argued, could hardly have happened unless Bulgaria, too, was about to come into the war. But on whose side? And when? Or was it just another move in the game of bargaining with her neutrality?

On such matters Wangenheim was always ready to comment, to correct and to inform. He was like the boy who has the crib with all the answers in it, and he spoke with a large air of frankness that seemed to put an end to all doubts and speculations.

As the spring advanced he developed the habit of sitting at the bottom of his garden at Therapia, on the Bosphorus, within nodding distance of all who passed by. He liked to stop his acquaintances when they were out walking in the morning and read them tit-bits from his latest telegrams. Soon Morgenthau noticed that when things were going well for the Germans the Ambassador was always there in his accustomed seat by the garden wall, but when the news was bad he was nowhere to be found. He told Wangenheim one day that he reminded him of one of those patent weather gauges equipped with a little figure that emerged in the sunshine and disappeared in the rain. Wangenheim laughed very heartily.

And, in fact, up to the middle of May, there were no reasons for the Germans to be apprehensive about Turkey. Instead of weakening and dividing the Government as in England, the Gallipoli landing had knitted the Young Turks together and made them stronger than ever. Unlike the Allies, the Turks were not obliged to advance in the peninsula; so long as the line held it was unlikely that Bulgaria or Rumania or even Greece would come in against them. The very strain of the war itself was useful; it gave them the right to requisition whatever property they liked, to call up more and more men for active service, to get a tighter control on everybody’s lives. There were now over half a million Turks in the Army, and this force was becoming steadily stronger as the threat from Russia died away; already in May divisions were being withdrawn from the Caucasus to strengthen the front at Gallipoli. The Germans, too, were increasing their garrison in Constantinople and in the peninsula. They had various means of smuggling men and munitions through Bulgaria and Rumania; it was even said that on one occasion a bogus circus was sent from Germany by rail, and the clowns on arrival turned out to be sergeants and their baggage filled with shells. Taube aircraft were flown across from Austria, refuelling at secret landing-places on the way. Soon there was another munitions factory working at Constantinople under German supervision, and guns from the old Turkish warships were dismantled and sent down to the front. Wangenheim in his role of local Kaiser in the German garrison took good care not to expose the Goeben to the British fleet in the Dardanelles; occasionally she went off hunting the Russian fleet in the Black Sea, but for the most part she rode at anchor in the Bosphorus.

Enver, the chief sponsor of the Germans, had great credit for all this. As Minister for War he somehow contrived to make it appear that he personally was responsible for the successful resistance in the peninsula just as he had been responsible for the defeat of the Fleet on March 18. There was not very much that Wangenheim, Talaat or anybody else could do to correct this impression. The young man ballooned up before them. However incredible it might be, the truth was that this boy, who had been born of a fifteen-year-old peasant girl on the Black Sea only thirty-five years before, was now virtually dictator of Turkey. He assumed all the trappings of dictatorship with apparent ease — the sudden tantrums and rages, the personal bodyguard, the uniform (the sword, the epaulettes and the black sheepskin fez), and the ring of subservient generals. Even the Germans in Turkey were becoming a little afraid of him, especially when he went over their heads and corresponded directly with the Kaiser.

There was a macabre incident about this time which shows very clearly how far Enver had travelled and how high he still hoped to go. Early in May he sent for Morgenthau and with a great show of anger told him that the British were bombarding helpless villages and towns in the Gallipoli peninsula. Mosques and hospitals had been burned down, he said, and a number of women and children had been killed. He proposed now to take reprisals; the 3,000 British and French citizens who were still living in Turkey were to be arrested and sent to concentration camps in the peninsula. Enver desired the Ambassador to inform the British and French governments through the State Department in Washington that henceforth they would be killing their own people at Gallipoli as well as Turks.

It was useless for Morgenthau to protest that towns like Gallipoli, Chanak and Maidos were military headquarters and that the Allies had a perfect right to bombard them; the best he could do was to get the women and children excluded from the order. A few days later, when the arrests began, an hysterical horde of French and British civilians descended on the American Embassy. Most of these people were Levantines who had been born in Turkey of British or French parentage and who had never seen either England or France. They gathered in hundreds round the Ambassador whenever he appeared, gesticulating and crying, clutching at his arms, imploring him to save them. After several days of this Morgenthau telephoned to Enver and demanded another interview. Enver replied smoothly that he was engaged in a council of Ministers but would be delighted to see the Ambassador on the afternoon of the following day. The hostages were due to be sent off to the peninsula in the morning, and it was only when Morgenthau threatened to force his way into the council room that Enver agreed to receive him at the Sublime Porte at once.

For one reason or another — perhaps because the Bulgarian Ambassador had just been in to protest against the arrests — Enver was excessively polite when Morgenthau arrived. He agreed after a while that perhaps he had made a mistake in this matter but it was too late to do anything about it: he never revoked orders. If he did he would lose his influence with the Army. He added, ‘If you can show me some way in which this order can be carried out, and your protégés still saved, I shall be glad to listen.’

‘All right,’ Morgenthau said, ‘I think I can. I should think you could still carry out your orders without sending all the French and English residents down. If you would send only a few you would still win your point. You could still maintain discipline in the Army and these few would be as strong a deterrent to the Allied Fleet as sending all.’

It seemed to Morgenthau that Enver seized on this suggestion almost eagerly. ‘How many will you let me send?’ he asked.

‘I would suggest that you take twenty English and twenty French — forty in all.’

‘Let me have fifty.’

‘All right, we won’t haggle over ten,’ Morgenthau answered, and the bargain having been made Enver conceded that only the youngest men should go. Bedri, the Chief of Police, was now sent for, and these arrangements did not suit him at all. ‘No, no, this will never do,’ he said. ‘I don’t want the youngest; I must have the notables.’

The point was still unsettled when Bedri and Morgenthau drove back to the American Embassy where the selection was to be made. It was with some difficulty that they made their way through the frantic crowd to Morgenthau’s office.

‘Can’t I have a few notables?’ Bedri repeated.

There was an Anglican clergyman named Dr. Wigram, who, Morgenthau knew, was determined to be one of the hostages. ‘I will give you just one,’ he said.

Bedri had his eye on a Dr. Frew and several well-known men in the French colony, and he insisted, ‘Can’t I have three?’

‘Dr. Wigram is the only notable you can have.’

In the end Bedri with a fairly good grace settled for the clergyman and forty-nine young men, but he gave himself the pleasure of telling them that the British were in the habit of regularly bombing the town of Gallipoli to which they were to be sent. On the following morning, amid frenzied scenes, and accompanied by Mr. Hoffman Philip, the American counsellor, and a quantity of American food, the party set off.

Morgenthau at once began to agitate for their return, and his task was not made easier by the arrival of a message from Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, stating that Enver and his fellow Ministers would be held personally responsible for any injury to the hostages.

‘I presented this message to Enver on May 9th,’ Morgenthau writes. ‘I had seen Enver in many moods, but the unbridled rage which Sir Edward’s admonition now caused was something entirely new. As I read the telegram his face became livid, and he absolutely lost control of himself. The European polish which Enver had sedulously acquired dropped like a mask; I now saw him for what he really was — a savage, bloodthirsty Turk. “They will not come back,” he shouted, “I shall let them stay there until they rot. I would like to see those English touch me.” And he added, “Don’t ever threaten me.” In the end, however, he calmed down and agreed that the hostages could come back to Constantinople.’

For a day or two this incident was the talk of Constantinople, but it was soon swallowed up in the general tide of half-truths and gossip, in the long, weary ennui of waiting for something definite to happen. Constantinople had a strange drifting existence at this time; it was in the war but not of it. It heard nothing and saw nothing and yet was ready to fear everything. The third week of May went by and still very few people had any real inkling of what was happening at the Dardanelles beyond the barren fact that the Allies were neither advancing nor being driven away. Nothing was published in the newspapers about the disastrous attack on the Anzac bridgehead on May 19, and the Ministry of War was careful to see that the increasing numbers of wounded returning from the front were taken through the city in the middle of the night when the streets were deserted. One quiet, uneasy day followed another, and it was not until May 25 that in the most unexpected and alarming way Constantinople was made to realize at last that the war was very near and very threatening. A British submarine surfaced in the Golden Horn.

The submarines in the second world war did far more damage than in the first, but they never re-created quite the same sort of helplessness, the sense of unfair lurking doom. In 1915 there were no depth charges and no asdic, and unless the submarine surfaced and exposed itself to ramming or to gunfire there was no sure means of detecting or destroying it. The unwieldy nets that were hung around the battleships were only a gesture of defence, and after the sinking of the Lusitania no merchantman ever felt safe, even in convoy, even at night.

Yet in 1915 the submarine service had still to prove itself. Everything about it was experimental, the size and armament of the vessel, its shape and speed, the way it should be used, and, perhaps most important of all, the endurance of the crews. How much could the men stand of this unnatural and claustrophobic life beneath the sea? And beyond this there was thought to be something ethically monstrous about the whole conception of submarines, a kind of barbarism which would end in the destruction of them all. The ‘Submariners’, in fact, were in much the same position as the young men in the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe in 1940; they were apart from the rest of the serving forces, a minority group with a strange, esoteric excitement of its own, and they were about to prove that they were capable of adventures which no one had ever dreamed of before. Far from cracking under the strain, they relished it; it was a new brand of courage, a controlled recklessness, a kind of joy in the power of the inhuman machine. It was not really a question of how much these men could stand, but of how far you could meet their demand for more speed, longer hours in action and more deadly gadgets.

But all this lay in the future in the early months of the first world war, and the submarine itself was still undergoing basic changes in design. The periscope, for example, was originally fixed in one set position, and its mirrors produced an inverted image, so the commander was obliged to bring the whole vessel close to the surface before he attacked, and his outlook was upon a strange world in which ships were for ever floating upside down. Even when the periscope became movable it was an unhandy device: as it rose upward the commander rose with it, beginning from a squatting position and ending on the tips of his toes. By 1915, however, most of these primitive inconveniences had been overcome, and the British E class (whose dispatch to the Dardanelles had so angered Lord Fisher) was a formidable instrument. It was a vessel of 725 tons, equipped with four torpedo tubes and oil engines which achieved a surface speed of about fifteen miles an hour. Submerged and running on its electric batteries it was capable of proceeding at ten knots for an hour, or even for periods of twenty hours at more economical speeds. In deep waters it descended by flooding its tanks until it had about a ton of buoyancy in hand, and the vessel, with its horizontal rudders depressed, was then driven down by its motors. Directly it stopped moving it rose to the surface again.

In shallow waters — and the E Class could descend to over 200 feet — the commanders had no fear of flooding their tanks entirely and of lying on the bottom so long as the air in the boat remained reasonably fresh — a period of some twenty hours. As they were not then moving there was still enough power in their accumulators to drive them to the surface again. The submarine’s time of greatest danger was, of course, during the three or four hours when it was obliged to cruise about on the surface to replenish its batteries.

At Gallipoli these submarines were faced with an objective which was entirely new and fantastically dangerous. If they could once get through to the Sea of Marmara they knew that they could do pretty much what they liked with the Turkish shipping, more particularly with the vessels that were bringing down reinforcements and supplies to Liman’s army on the peninsula. But how to get there, how to penetrate the Dardanelles?

The straits were swept all night by searchlights, and as soon as a submarine surfaced, as it was practically bound to do in the course of the forty-mile journey, it was not only fired on but ran the risk of being caught by the various currents that set towards the shore. Ten lines of mines off Kephez Point had to be negotiated, and beyond these there were the Narrows, under a mile wide, with guns on either side and patrol boats on the watch. There was another hazard: a stratum of fresh water about ten fathoms deep poured down the Dardanelles from the Sea of Marmara, and it was of much lighter density than the salt water below. This made a kind of barrier in the sea, and as they passed through it the submarines were thrown violently out of control. It was not unlike the experiences of the first supersonic aircraft when they met the sound barrier in the sky; no one could make out why this strange, deadly disturbance should occur, and the commanders were forced to rise to the surface where they at once came under the fire from the enemy batteries on the shore.

Up to the time of the landing every attempt to force the Narrows had failed, and even the Australian E2 was to last only a few days before she was caught on the surface and sunk. A French submarine, the Joule, was destroyed before she even reached Chanak. Yet the exploit still seemed possible, and the young commanders of the E Class submarines who came out from England during April were eager to try again. Many of them had fought under Roger Keyes’s command in the North Sea during the early months of the war, and their morale was very high. They believed they had only to try new tactics and they would get through.

For the German U-boats the problem at Gallipoli was quite different. Their target — and it was a superb target, almost a sitting duck — was the British battle fleet cruising along the shore of the peninsula in the open Ægean, and they were withheld from it not by the Narrows but by the wide expanse of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. In April there was no German U-boat at Constantinople and none in the Mediterranean. The only way for the Germans to reach the scene of action was to sail round northern Europe and enter the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar; and this meant running the engines until almost the last ounce of fuel was gone. There was, it was true, a scheme for sending small U-boats in section by rail to Pola on the Adriatic coast, but nothing had come of this as yet.

And so at the opening of the campaign both sides were baulked in their undersea offensive. Each could see the prize plainly before it: for the British it was the helpless Turkish shipping in the Marmara, for the Germans the unprotected Allied battleships in the Ægean; and neither so far had been able to strike.

But now, at the end of April, there began a series of events which were to alter the whole character of the campaign. On April 25, the very day of the landing, Lieut.-Commander Otto Hersing, in the German U-boat 21, set out from Ems on the long journey around the north of Scotland for the Mediterranean. Two days later at Gallipoli, Lieut.-Commander Boyle, in the British E 14, slipped quietly into the Dardanelles and headed for the Narrows. From this moment both the Allied Fleet and the Turks on Gallipoli were in extreme danger.

Boyle had the idea of going through the Dardanelles on the surface under the cover of darkness, and he set off at two in the morning. He had not gone very far, however, before the Turkish searchlights and guns drove him down to a depth of ninety feet, and he continued there until he judged that he had passed under the Kephez minefield. Then he came up to twenty-two feet, intending to make the actual passage of the Narrows with his periscope raised. The disadvantage of this manœuvre was that the periscope made a distinct wash on the sea, and there was a desperate half-hour when the enemy guns around Chanak got his range. At one stage the crew of a Turkish patrol boat were grabbing at the periscope whenever Boyle brought it to the surface for a few seconds to see where he was going. Yet he got away, and soon after dawn came up unscathed in the Sea of Marmara. The passage had taken six hours.

For the next three weeks the E 14 cruised about at will. Her greatest success was the sinking of an old White Star liner that was bringing down from Constantinople 6,000 troops who were to join in the battle on the Cape Helles front. There were no survivors. It was a bigger victory than anything that had yet occurred on land, and there was immense elation in the Allied Fleet when Boyle came safely out again into the Ægean on May 18. Now at last they had found a way through. Admiral Guépratte had in the meantime lost a French submarine in the mysterious barrier in the straits, but that did not prevent him from congratulating the British; he sailed his flagship round the E 14 with his band playing Tipperary and the British national anthem.

Another submarine, the E 11, was waiting to take the E 14’s place in the Marmara, and her young captain, Lieut-Commander Nasmith, dined aboard the flagship on the night of May 18 with de Robeck, Keyes and Boyle. It was an animated party. Boyle had been recommended for an immediate award of the Victoria Cross. Keyes, who was still chafing at the withdrawal of the Queen Elizabeth and at the latest refusal of the Admiralty to allow the Fleet to resume its attack on the Narrows, thought he had begun to see a ray of light at last. Having heard Boyle’s story, Nasmith set off that same night, and sixteen hours after leaving the Admiral’s dining-table he was resting on the bottom of the Sea of Marmara. Unknown to anyone he had formed a plan which was more daring than anything which had been attempted before: a direct attack on Constantinople itself.

His first act on coming to the surface near the town of Gallipoli was to seize a Turkish sailing vessel and lash her to the E 11’s side, so that she would act both as a disguise and a decoy. When after several days no target appeared he cast off this Trojan sea-horse and steamed directly up the Marmara.

On May 23 he sank a Turkish gunboat and several other smaller craft, and then on the following day he fell in with the Nagara, a transport that was making its way down to the Dardanelles. There was an American journalist on board the Nagara, Raymond Gram Swing of the Chicago Daily News, and he says he was on deck that morning chatting to a Bavarian doctor. Boyle’s exploits of the previous weeks had become known in Constantinople, and Swing had just remarked to the doctor, ‘It’s a fine morning for submarines,’ when he paused, gazed out to sea in astonishment, and added, ‘And there’s one.’ E 11 broke the calm surface very gently about a hundred yards away, and four men appeared on the conning tower. One of them in a white sweater (it was Nasmith), used his cupped hands as a megaphone: ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m Swing of the Chicago Daily News.’

‘Glad to meet you, Mr. Swing, but what I mean is what ship is that?’

‘The Turkish transport Nagara.’

By now the ship’s crew were in a state of extreme alarm, some coursing about the deck, others, with their fezzes still on their heads, jumping into the sea.

‘Are those marines?’ Nasmith asked.

‘No, they’re just sailors.’

‘Well, I’m going to sink you.’

Swing asked, ‘Can we get off?’

‘Yes, and be damned quick about it.’

The confusion in the Nagara had now reached the point where everyone had begun to scramble over the sides, and the lifeboats were lowered so clumsily that they half filled with water. The Turks were frenziedly baling with their fezzes. As Swing appeared to be the only calm man on board, Nasmith directed him in launching the last boat and in picking up the sailors and passengers who had jumped or fallen into the sea. Nasmith then closed the ship, and an immense orange flame went up as he sank her: she was filled with ammunition.

Soon after this E 11 was driven away from the coast by a detachment of Turkish cavalry, but she managed to chase and sink another transport, and a third ship beached herself on the shore. By now the survivors of the wrecks had raised the alarm in Constantinople, and from early morning on May 25 the Turkish artillery on both sides of the Bosphorus were standing to their guns. In order to calm the population in the event of an action taking place, an announcement was made that there might be firing practice during the course of the day.

The submarine surfaced at 12.40 p.m., and Nasmith saw before him a large freighter, the Stamboul, berthed alongside the arsenal. His first torpedo ran in a circle and on its return narrowly missed the E 11 herself. His second, however, struck home, and he dived, heading through the city into the Bosphorus, while a barrage of artillery crashed over his head.

The panic that now broke out in Constantinople gives an indication of what might have happened had the Allied Fleet appeared there in March. While the Goeben hastily shifted her anchorage into the shelter of her attendant ships, a mob fled through the streets and everywhere the shops ran up their shutters. On the docks all activity ceased, and a contingent of soldiers which was embarking for Gallipoli was precipitately ordered back to the shore again. Now, in one moment, the powder factory on the wharves and the crowded wooden houses on the slopes above seemed utterly exposed, and it was apparent to everyone that there was very little that the fire brigade could do if this was to be the prelude to a serious attack.

Meanwhile, Nasmith and his men were struggling for their lives. The current in the Bosphorus was even stronger than in the Dardanelles, and for some twenty minutes the submarine was out of control, bumping from shoal to shoal along the bottom as far as Leander’s Tower. She was righted eventually, and with great skill Nasmith turned back through Constantinople. ‘The next day,’ here-ported later, ‘was spent resting in the centre of the Sea of Marmara.’

Then on May 27 he resumed his attack, sinking ship after ship in the approaches to the Golden Horn. A terror spread through the Sea of Marmara, for it was thought that at least half a dozen submarines were operating. No vessel of any size was allowed to leave port without an escort of destroyers and gunboats, and these repeatedly tried to ram the E 11 whenever she rose to the surface to attack. Nasmith paused in his operations only when the air in the submarine became so foul that he was obliged to surface in order to allow the crew to come on deck and bathe.

Soon the shortage of torpedoes became the E 11’s chief concern, and those that remained were set to run on the surface so that whenever they missed their targets Nasmith could dive into the sea and recover them. By June 5 a serious defect had developed in the port main motor, the starboard intermediate shaft had cracked, only two torpedoes were left, and Nasmith judged it time to go home. He entered the Dardanelles and steamed down as far as Chanak hunting for the Turkish battleship Barbarossa Harradin, upon which he had made an unsuccessful attack a few days before. He saw nothing, however, except a large transport anchored above Nagara. The E 11 was now in the most dangerous part of the Narrows, and in her crippled state was quite likely to be washed ashore. But it was unbearable to Nasmith that he should leave with two torpedoes still intact; he turned back up the Dardanelles, sank the transport, and then returned for the crucial dive through the Narrows. Off Chanak the trim of the boat became violently affected by the change in the density of the water, and Nasmith dived to seventy feet. About an hour later he heard a scraping noise which seemed to indicate that the keel was hitting the bottom, and since he knew this to be impossible he rose up to twenty feet below the surface to investigate. He saw then that about twenty feet ahead of the periscope a large mine had been torn from its moorings by the port hydroplane and was being towed along. Saying nothing to his crew, Nasmith continued for another hour until he was outside the entrance to the straits. He then went full speed astern with the bows of the submarine submerged and the rush of water from the screws carried the mine away.

There was another dinner aboard the flagship that night, and at the end of it Boyle in E 14 set off again for the Marmara, while Lieut.-Commander Nasmith, V.C., sailed the E 11 to Malta for repairs.

An extreme crisis had overtaken the Allied Fleet while Nasmith had been away, and it was every bit as serious as the alarm which he had created in Constantinople. Towards the middle of May news had come through that a U-boat (it was Hersing in the U 21) had been sighted passing through the Straits of Gibraltar. It had been fired at but had got away, and was then presumably headed for Gallipoli.

During the next week, when Nasmith in the E 11 had vanished into the silence of the Sea of Marmara, there had been a growing depression in the Fleet. The Queen Elizabeth had been something of a symbol for the whole expedition, and it had seemed to the soldiers on shore as well as the sailors at sea that a good few of their hopes had gone with her when she sailed away. De Robeck had transferred his flag to the Lord Nelson, and had remained off the peninsula with the other battleships, but it was not the same thing. The Fleet had an apprehensive air. Each day the tension increased, and the men on watch kept seeing periscopes on every side. A gambolling porpoise was enough to raise the alarm, and so were the dead and bloated mules that floated out to sea from the battlefield on shore, their legs projecting to the sky.

In the very early dawn of May 24 a genuine emergency occurred: the old battleship Albion ran her bows on to a sandbank off Gaba Tepe and the Turks fired more than a hundred shells into her while the British tried to tow her off. Eventually the ship lightened herself by firing off all her heavy guns together, and in the recoil she got away. This incident had nothing to do with submarines, and there were under a dozen casualties, yet it was one more addition to the general feeling of insecurity.

Then on the following morning — at the very moment that Nasmith was gliding into the wharves at Constantinople — the Vengeance reported that a torpedo had passed across her bows while she was steaming between Anzac and Helles. It was true enough. Hersing had managed to get into the Austrian port of Cattaro before his oil ran out, and when he had refuelled he came straight through to Gallipoli.

A commotion spread through the Allied ships. De Robeck in haste transferred his flag again from the Lord Nelson to the Triad, a large yacht which had once been a pleasure-going ship along the Bosphorus, and all the more valuable battleships and transports were ordered to retire at once to Mudros. There was a feeling of desolation in the Army as the ships vanished over the horizon leaving behind them an unfamiliar, almost empty sea. Those few of the larger vessels that remained could not disguise the atmosphere of tension in which they waited, hour by hour, for the hidden attack which now seemed bound to come.

Commander Hersing struck at mid-day. He saw the old battleship Triumph near Gaba Tepe with a ring of destroyers circling round her, waited for his chance, and fired. The torpedo passed easily through the Triumph’s nets and the ship at once took a heavy list. For eight minutes, while the destroyers came rushing in to the rescue, she remained at an angle of forty-five degrees, spilling her crew into the sea. Then she capsized and floated for a time with her green bottom upwards in the sunlight. The crews on the neighbouring ships stood to attention as she made her last plunge down to the bottom through clouds of smoke and steam. All this took place in full view of the two opposing armies on the shore, and while the Anzac soldiers watched in dismay a cheer came up from the Turkish trenches. This was the finest sight the enemy had seen since the campaign began, but they had no wish to be vindictive; after a few opening shots no further attempt was made to fire on the wreck or her survivors.

The Triumph was a twelve-years-old ship of 11,800 tons, and only seventy-one men had gone down with her, but this was the end of the security of all battleships at Gallipoli. De Robeck gave orders for a further retirement, and presently the Majestic, the oldest battleship of them all, was left alone with a screen of destroyers off Cape Helles. Admiral Nicholson, the commander of the flotilla there, came aboard her from the Swiftsure during the course of the afternoon. So eager were Nicholson and his staff to let the Swiftsure get away that they did not wait to pack their belongings; baggage, bedding, tinned preserves and an assortment of wines were dumped in a trawler and ferried across in a matter of minutes.

Few believed that the Majestic would survive, and the soldiers in their dugouts kept watching her all afternoon as she cruised along the shore. By nightfall, however, nothing had happened, and the old battleship went back to Imbros in the darkness. Some fishing nets had been erected across the mouth of the open harbour there, and these she carried away on her first attempt to enter; but otherwise no harm came to her through the night. Keyes went out in the destroyer Grampus hoping to ram the enemy submarine if she surfaced, but he saw nothing.

In the morning half a gale was blowing, and although the submarine scare was still at its height de Robeck felt that the Navy could not leave the Army entirely in the lurch. The Majestic was ordered back to Helles again, and she remained off-shore all through that day and the following night. A half-cynical fatalism prevailed on board; in the officers’ wardroom the last of the champagne and the port was drunk on the grounds that it would have been a pity to see it go to the bottom.

At 6.40 the following morning the cry ‘Torpedo coming’ went up, and the sailors ran for the boats. The strike was made so low down on the port side there was scarcely a tremor on deck, but immediately afterwards a loud explosion shook the ship and she heeled over to port. The crew were given just fifteen minutes to get off before she sank bottom upward, her bows resting on a sandbank by the shore and exposing a fraction of her keel above the surface. A moment before the end a sailor ran the full length of the keel with the sea closing in around him. He reached the exposed bows just in time, and sat astride there until presently a boat came by and took him off. Forty-eight of his shipmates were lost. For the rest of the campaign the upturned hulk of the battleship remained there, like some stranded whale washed up on the shore.

For a few minutes it looked as though they were going to catch the U 21. Air Commodore Samson was circling overhead, and he dropped his bombs on the U-boat through the clear water. But Hersing dived under the French battleship Henri IV, and when Samson picked him up again, steaming up the Dardanelles in the sunshine, all his bombs were gone. But he permitted himself a gesture: he swooped and emptied his rifle on to her hull. The U 21 was last seen moving into the Narrows, and at some point in the Sea of Marmara must have passed Nasmith returning from Constantinople.

Thus on this one day, May 25, almost in one hour, two submarines, the German U 21 and the British E 11, brought an entirely new element into the campaign, and it was almost as important as the twenty Turkish mines which had been sown so fortuitously in Eren Keui Bay when the Allied Fleet attacked in March.

Nasmith’s raid was, perhaps, the more telling of the two, for it caused the Turks to issue an immediate order that for the time being no further reinforcements were to be sent to the peninsula by sea. Instead of a short overnight voyage the soldiers were now faced with a roundabout train journey of 150 miles to Uzun Keupri on the Adrianople line. Thence a single road led down into the peninsula, another hundred miles away — a march of at least five days for the men, and of considerably more for the bullock carts and the camels that were now obliged to bring in their equipment. Other supplies had to be sent down the Sea of Marmara by small boats which hugged the coast and travelled only by night. All this meant a drastic slowing down of Liman’s line of supply. ‘Had the British managed to increase their undersea offensive,’ he says in the study of the campaign which he wrote after the war, ‘the Fifth Army would have starved.’ And the German naval historian adds: ‘The activity of the hostile submarines was a constant and heavy anxiety, and if communication by sea had been completely severed the Army would have been faced with catastrophe.’ At one point the Turks on the peninsula were down to 160 rounds of ammunition per man.

Liman is a little tart about the activities — or rather the lack of activity — of the German Navy. The story was spread in Germany, he says, that the Goeben and the German submarines carried the main burden of the defence at Gallipoli; but the Goeben never took part at all, and the U 21, having got safely through to Constantinople and been much fêted there, emerged only once again. She came out of the straits on July 4 and sank the French transport Carthage. Finding that his return route was blocked, Hersing turned west and steamed for the Adriatic, to be seen no more. Yet he had achieved his purpose. The mere threat of his presence off Gallipoli had scattered the Allied battle fleet, and his two sinkings were enough to keep it in harbour in the islands ever afterwards.

For the British submarines, however, the situation was rather more difficult; in order to make good the work that had already been done by Boyle and Nasmith they had to keep up the pressure in the Sea of Marmara and if possible increase it; and indeed, in all the records of the Royal Navy there is hardly anything that quite compares with the undersea offensive that now began. In a world that has since grown used to the unearthly courage of young men with fantastic machines it is still difficult to credit some of the things that happened. Six-pounder guns were fitted to the decks of the submarines to help them eke out their supply of torpedoes, and two new arrivals, the E 12 and the E 7, ran up to Constantinople, where they bombarded the powder mills, put a torpedo into the arsenal, cut the railway line and chased the trains along the shore. Soon the commanders learned to handle the changing density of the water, and they even turned it to advantage; by lying on top of the layer of heavier specific gravity when they wished to hide or rest they saved themselves the danger and difficulty of diving great depths to the ocean floor.

It was on Boyle’s third trip into the Marmara, on July 21, that a new hazard was discovered. As he passed through the Narrows he saw an obstruction under the water, and he reported this to Lieut.-Commander Cochrane in the E 7, when he met her in the Marmara next day. On July 24 Cochrane came out and he confirmed Boyle’s report: the Germans were building a net. He himself had been entangled in it for half an hour, ninety feet down.

This was a much more formidable obstacle than anything the submarines had encountered before. By the end of July it was completed — a vast steel mesh of two-and-a-half-inch wire stretching entirely across the straits, and reaching 220 feet down to the floor of the channel. A line of buoys painted alternately red and black supported it on the surface, and one end was secured on the peninsula about a mile north of Maidos, the other on a steamer anchored near Abydos on the Asiatic side. Turkish motorboats loaded with bombs patrolled the surface like spiders waiting at the edge of a web. Specially sited guns were set up on either bank.

There was a gate in the middle of the net, and unless the submarines were lucky enough to strike it their only way of getting through the wire was to ram it at full speed underwater and hope for the best. Boyle described this experience: ‘I missed the gate and hit the net. I was brought up from eighty feet to forty-five feet in three seconds, but luckily only thrown fifteen degrees off my course. There was a tremendous noise, scraping, banging, tearing and rumbling, and it sounded as if there were two distinct obstructions, as the noise nearly ceased and then came on again, and we were appreciably checked twice. It took about twenty seconds to get through.’

But Cochrane on his next trip did not get through. Hopelessly entangled, he fought the net for twelve hours on the bottom of the straits while bombs exploded about him, and it was only when the hull was leaking and the lights had failed that he burned his papers and rose to the surface to surrender.

Nasmith, Boyle and the others were not deterred; they continued to pass through, and by the end of the year the net was so damaged by their repeated rammings it had almost vanished altogether. Up to the last, however, the passage through the Narrows remained an ordeal of the most frightening kind, and perhaps from that very fact it acted as a psychological stimulus on the crews. One seems to have read the story in some boyhood book of sea adventure: the pirates’ cave with its treasure lies hidden in the cliffs, but one has to make a dangerous dive beneath the sea to reach it. And some get through and some get trapped halfway.

There is an almost dolphin-like air, a precise abandon, in the way the E-boats frisked about at times. On seeing a convoy, the commanders would deliberately surface and pretend to be in difficulties so as to entice the protective gunboats away. Then, diving deep, they would turn back and demolish the boats of the convoy one by one. They shot up the caravans of camels and bullock carts making their way down the Bulair isthmus with loads of barbed wire and ammunition. When they were short of fresh food they surfaced beside the Turkish trading caiques and provided themselves with fruit and vegetables. Wherever they could they saved their torpedoes and their ammunition by boarding enemy ships and simply opening the sea-cocks or placing a charge on the keel. Sometimes prisoners were carried around for days on end before they could be put ashore, and these were often very strange people — Arabs in their desert robes, sponge-divers and Turkish Imams, and once a German banker, wearing only a short pink vest, who complained that 5,000 marks in gold had just been sent to the bottom.

When more than one submarine was operating the commanders would make a rendezvous, and with their vessels tied up together far out in the Sea of Marmara they would exchange information for an hour or two, while their crews bathed in the sunshine; and then perhaps they would go off on a hunt together. Once there was a disaster. The French Turquoise ran aground and was captured. Enemy intelligence officers found in the captain’s notebook a reference to a meeting which he was to have at sea in a few days’ tine with the British E 20. It was a German U-boat that kept the rendezvous, and she torpedoed E 20 directly she came to the surface. Only the British commander and eight of the crew who were on deck survived.

In August Nasmith sank the battleship Barbarossa Harradin. Expecting that she would come south to take part in a new battle on the peninsula, he lay in wait for her at the top of the Narrows — having, on the way through, scraped heavily against a mine. The battleship appeared in the early dawn escorted by two destroyers, and she was taken utterly by surprise. She capsized and sank within a quarter of an hour.

Nasmith then went on to Constantinople and arrived just at the moment when a collier from the Black Sea had berthed herself beside the Haidar Pasha railway station. Coal at this time had become more precious than gold at Constantinople, since it was so scarce and since everything depended upon it — the railways and the ships, the factories, the city’s supply of light and water. A committee of officials was standing on the wharf discussing how the coal should be apportioned when E 11’s torpedo struck and the ship blew up before their eyes.

Next the submarine turned into the Gulf of Ismid, where the Constantinople-Baghdad railway ran over a viaduct close to the sea, and there d’Oyly-Hughes, the first officer, swam ashore and blew up the line. Like Freyberg at the beginning of the campaign, he was half dead when the E 11 picked him up again.

There were in all 13 submarines engaged in the Sea of Marmara, and although 8 were destroyed the passage was made 27 times. The Turkish losses were 1 battleship (apart from the Messudieh sunk in the previous year), 1 destroyer, 5 gunboats, 11 transports, 44 steamers and 148 sailing boats. Nasmith’s bag alone was 101 vessels, and he was in the Marmara for three months, including a stay of 47 days — a record that was never surpassed in the first world war. By the end of the year all movement of enemy ships by daylight had practically ceased, and with rare exceptions only the most urgent supplies were sent by sea to the peninsula.

It is doubtful if the success of the submarines was ever fully understood by the British while the campaign was going on. At Hamilton’s and de Robeck’s headquarters the sinkings seem to have been regarded more in the nature of a delightful surprise, a bonus on the side, than as the basis for a main offensive. It never seems to have occurred to them that they might have followed up d’Oyly-Hughes’ adventure, that commandos might have been landed north of Bulair to have cut the Turkish land route to the peninsula.

Nor were the Germans any more imaginative. Five small U-boats were eventually assembled at Pola, and managed to get through to Constantinople, but apart from one or two lucky shots at transports coming out of Alexandria they made no further attempt on the Fleet at Gallipoli. By September forty-three German U-boats had been sent to the Mediterranean, but the bulk of the pack remained in the western half of the sea, and they failed to sink any of the ships bringing reinforcements out from England.

And so there was, even as early as May, some reasonable chance of the expedition gathering impetus again. If the Allies were being starved of supplies, so too were the Turks; the lost British battleships were being replaced by monitors, and with the arrival of the Lowland division Hamilton’s forces outnumbered the enemy in the peninsula.

Hamilton in any case was an optimistic man. The sinking of the battleships had been a terrible blow, and on board the Arcadian the General himself was living in the most insecure conditions, so insecure indeed that two transports were lashed to the ship’s side to act as torpedo-buffers. Dismayed but still buoyant, he wrote in his diary: ‘We are left all alone in our glory with our two captive merchantmen. The attitude is heroic but not, I think, so dangerous as it is uncomfortable. The big ocean liners lashed to port and starboard cut us off from light as well as air, and one of them is loaded with Cheddar. When Mr. Jorrocks awoke James Pigg and asked him to open the window to see what sort of a hunting morning it was, it will be remembered that the huntsman opened the cupboard by mistake and made the reply, “Hellish dark and smells of cheese.” Well, that immortal remark hits us off to a T. Never mind. Light will be vouchsafed. Amen.’

Useless now to reflect that the Triumph and the Majestic—and the Goliath too — might have gone to a better end by making a new attempt on the Narrows; or to think of how the great armada of battleships had been scattered and forced to retire into the harbour at Mudros whence it had so confidently set out a month before. The only thing to do now was to wait for news from London, to hope for reinforcements and to hold on.