Gallipoli

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE soldiers at Gallipoli were wrong in thinking that the campaign had been abandoned and forgotten in London. Directly the new government was in office Churchill circulated a paper to cabinet Ministers in which he argued that while the Allies had neither the men nor the ammunition to bring about a decision in France, a comparatively small addition to Hamilton’s forces would make all the difference at Gallipoli.[24] ‘It seems most urgent,’ he wrote, ‘to try to obtain a decision here and wind up the enterprise in a satisfactory manner as soon as possible.’ If the Army advanced just three or four miles up the peninsula the Fleet could steam through to the Sea of Marmara and all the old objects could still be realized: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the support of Russia, the allegiance of the Balkans. Where else in all the other theatres of war could they look during the next three months for such a victory?

Kitchener himself had for some time been approaching this point of view, and in June he came the whole way. The recruiting and training of his new army in England was now well advanced, but it was not yet ready for a resumption of the offensive in France. ‘Such an attack,’ he wrote, ‘before an adequate supply of guns and high-explosive shell can be provided, would only result in heavy casualties and the capture of another turnip field.’

It was an indication of this new approach that as soon as the new cabinet was formed the War Council had been reconstructed under the name of the Dardanelles Committee. It met on June 7, and Kitchener and Churchill between them had no difficulty in getting the members to agree to the dispatch of another three divisions to Gallipoli. By the end of the month two more divisions had been added, and three of the largest ocean liners, the Olympic, the Mauretania and the Aquitania, had been chartered to take them to the Mediterranean. By the beginning of July Hamilton was informed that he was to have the ammunition for which he had been so persistently pleading, and a few weeks later the War Office was writing: ‘We should like to hear from you after considering your plans whether there is anything further in the way of personnel, guns or ammunition we can send you, as we are most anxious to give you everything you can possibly require and use.’

It was almost an embarrassment of favours. By now Hamilton had either in Gallipoli or in transit an army of thirteen divisions or approximately some 120,000 effective men. This was no longer a distracting novel enterprise: it was the front on which the main British hopes were fixed, and men and shells were being withheld from France to supply it.

The Admiralty, too, was making a large contribution. The monitors arrived to replace the battleships, strange, flat-bottomed boats of 6,000 tons, mounting 14-inch guns of American manufacture. Their most original feature was the blisters or bulges on their sides, designed to ward off the explosions of torpedoes (which the sailors soon discovered made excellent bathing platforms). Almost as important were the Beetles, the landing barges which had been designed by Fisher and which were to be the precursors of the small craft used at Normandy and other landings in the second world war. They were capable of carrying five hundred men or forty horses, and were fitted with armoured plates sufficiently strong to resist shrapnel and machine-gun fire. The name derived from the fact that they were painted black, and the long landing ramps which projected from their bows had the appearance of antennae.

Two more balloon ships, the Hector and the Canning, were sent out to assist in the artillery spotting, and there were additions to the number of trawlers, auxiliary hospital ships, and other craft. It was a less imposing fleet than the one which had originally sailed to the Dardanelles in the spring, but it was larger and much better suited to an amphibious operation in a narrow sea.

A similar change overtook the Air Force with the arrival of new seaplane carriers and pilots, the French setting themselves up on Tenedos and the British on Imbros. As many as fifteen aircraft were now able to take off together for concentrated raids on the peninsula and the Narrows.

Towards the end of July, when a lull had again settled over the front, most of these new forces were concentrated in the Ægean islands, where they were to be kept in secret until the moment came to commit them to the battle. A new landing on the enemy coast was obviously essential, and all the old arguments came up once again: Bulair was too strongly fortified, the Asiatic coast too distant from their objectives, and at neither place could the Navy give its full support to the Army on the shore. So once again it had to be the peninsula itself. The plan that finally emerged was very largely a repetition of April 25, but it had one vital difference: the emphasis was now removed from Cape Helles and Achi Baba and placed upon the Sari Bair ridge in the centre of the peninsula. Birdwood had been urging this course for some weeks past, and in many ways it appeared to be a promising design. He proposed to break out of the north of the Anzac bridgehead by night and assault Chunuk Bair and the crests of the hills, having first made a major feint at a place called Lone Pine to the south. Simultaneously there was to be a new landing at Suvla Bay, immediately to the north of Anzac, and it was hoped that as soon as the hills there were taken the combined force would push through to the Narrows about four miles away. With the bulk of the Turkish Army then bottled up in the tip of the peninsula, and under heavy pressure from the French and the British at Cape Helles, it was hoped that there would be a quick ending to the campaign, at any rate as far as the Dardanelles was concerned.

There were to be pretended landings at Bulair and from the island of Mytilene on to the Asiatic coast so as to keep Liman in doubt until after the main battle had been joined. Once again surprise was the chief element of the plan; once again the Fleet was to hold its hand until the Army had broken through.

Suvla Bay was an admirable place for the new landing. It offered a safe anchorage for the Fleet, it was backed by low undulating country, and it was known to be very lightly defended. Once ashore the soldiers would quickly join up with the Anzac bridgehead and relieve the congestion in that narrow space. There was a salt lake about a mile and a half wide directly behind the Suvla Bay beaches, but this dried up in summer, and Hamilton in any case planned to avoid it by landing in the first instance on an easy strip of coastline just south of the Bay itself. Everything depended upon the speed with which the soldiers pushed inland to the hills so that they could bring assistance to Birdwood fighting the main battle on Sari Bair. This time there was to be no repetition of the River Clyde and the Sedd-el-Bahr disaster for the troops were to come ashore by night without preliminary bombardment.

In addition to the Beetles (which were to be commanded by Commander Unwin, V.C., in the first assault), a great deal of modern equipment had been shipped out to the Ægean. An antisubmarine net, over a mile in length, was to be laid across the mouth of Suvla Bay immediately after the landing. A pontoon pier 300 feet long had been assembled at Imbros, and was to be towed across to the beach. Four 50-ton water lighters were also to be taken over by the water steamer Krini, which had another 200 tons on board in addition to pumps and hoses. As a further precaution the Egyptian bazaars were once again ransacked for camel tanks, milk cans, skins — anything that would hold water.

For a time Hamilton debated whether or not he should bring the battered but experienced 29th Division round from Cape Helles to make the first landing at Suvla, but in the end he decided that the operation should be entrusted to the new troops coming out from England. Extreme secrecy was the key to all these arrangements, and there was a special difficulty in reinforcing Birdwood for the battle. The Anzac bridgehead was not much bigger than Regent’s Park in London, or Central Park in New York (if one can imagine a park of bare cliffs and peaks), and just as much overlooked. The Navy, however, believed that over a series of nights they could smuggle another 25,000 men ashore without the Turks knowing anything about it.

The Army was finally disposed as follows: the six divisions already in Cape Helles, about 35,000 men, to remain where they were and make a northern thrust against the village of Krithia; Birdwood with his Australians, New Zealanders and a division and a half of new British troops, about 37,000 men in all, to make the main attack at Anzac, and the remainder of the reinforcements from the United Kingdom, numbering some 25,000, to go ashore at Suvla.

August 6 was fixed as the day of the offensive, since the waning moon, then in its last quarter, would not rise until about 10.30 that night, and the boats on the Suvla landing would thus be able to approach the coast in the darkness. The actual timing of the various attacks was arranged so as to create the maximum confusion in the enemy command. It was a chain reaction, a succession of explosions from south to north, beginning with the first bombardment on the Helles front at 2.30 in the afternoon. There would then follow the Australian feint at Lone Pine at 5.30, the main assault on Chunuk Bair at 9.30 at night, and the landing at Suvla about an hour later. Thus by midnight the whole front would be ablaze.

By the end of June all these plans were well advanced, and Keyes and the Army staff were again involved with their elaborate timetables for the ferrying of the troops and their supplies from the islands to the beaches. Meanwhile a crucial issue had arisen over the question of who was to have command of the new landing at Suvla. Hamilton had two men in mind, Sir Julian Byng and Sir Henry Rawlinson, but when he put their names up to Kitchener he was refused on the grounds that neither could be spared from France. The appointment, Kitchener decided, must go to the most suitable and senior Lieutenant-General who was not already in a field command. This practically narrowed the choice down to the Hon. Sir Frederick Stopford, and he duly arrived at Mudros with his chief staff officer Brigadier-General Reed, on July 11. Hamilton had misgivings about both of them. Stopford was 61, and although he had been in Egypt and the Sudan in the ’eighties, and had served as military secretary to General Buller in the Boer War, he had seen very little actual fighting and had never commanded troops in war. He had a reputation as a teacher of military history, but he had been living in retirement since 1909, and was often in ill-health. Reed, a gunner, had also been in South Africa, and had won a memorable V.C. there, but his recent experiences in France had left him with an obsession for tremendous artillery bombardments, and he could talk of very little else.

The officers commanding the five new divisions were of similar cast: professional soldiers who had made their way upward mostly on the strength of their years of service. Many of them, generals and colonels alike, were men who were well over fifty and who had been in retirement when the war broke out. Major-General Hammersley, the officer who was to lead the 11th Division on the actual assault at Suvla, had suffered a breakdown a year or two before. It was a curious position; while the generals were old Regular Army soldiers, their troops were civilians and very young; and all of them, generals as well as soldiers, were wholly unused to the rough and individual kind of campaigning upon which they were now to be engaged.

Soon after he arrived at Mudros Stopford was sent over to Cape Helles for a few days to accustom himself to conditions at the front, and it was there that he was shown the plan on July 22. He was well satisfied. ‘This is the plan which I have always hoped he (Hamilton) would adopt,’ he said. ‘It is a good plan. I am sure it will succeed and I congratulate whoever has been responsible for framing it.’ But the General soon changed his mind.

On the following day he had a talk with Reed, the exponent of artillery bombardments, and on July 25 he went over to Anzac on an afternoon visit so that he could survey the Suvla plain from the slopes of Sari Bair. These experiences unsettled Stopford profoundly. On July 26 he called with Reed at G.H.Q. at Imbros and together they tore the plan to pieces. He must have more artillery, Stopford said, more howitzers to fire into the enemy trenches. It was pointed out to him that at Suvla there were no enemy trenches to speak of; Hamilton himself had been close to the shore in a destroyer and had seen no sign of life there. Samson had flown over within the last day or so and his photographs revealed nothing more than 150 yards of entrenchments between the salt lake and the sea. But Stopford remained only half convinced and Reed was quite tireless in his criticisms. Next they argued that the force should be put ashore within the bay itself. The Navy was all against this, since the water there was shallow and uncharted and no one could say what reefs or shoals might wreck the boats in the darkness. In the end, however, they agreed to land one of the three assaulting brigades inside the bay.

Still another difficulty arose over corps headquarters. Hamilton, remembering his isolation aboard the Queen Elizabeth on April 25, wanted Stopford to remain at Imbros during the early hours of the landing since he would be in touch with the troops by wireless as soon as they were ashore, and soon afterwards a telephone cable was to be laid from Imbros to the Suvla beaches. Stopford insisted that he must remain close to his troops aboard his headquarters ship, the sloop Jonquil, and in the end he had his way.

His other objections to the plan were of a vague and more subtle kind. In the original drafting it had been stated quite definitely that, since speed was. essential, the assaulting troops were to reach a series of low hills, known as Ismail Oglu Tepe, by daylight. There were good reasons for this. The interrogations of prisoners had gone to show that no more than three enemy battalions were holding the Suvla area, and the whole point of the landing was to overwhelm them and seize the high ground before the Turkish reinforcements could arrive. Since all Liman’s forces in the south of the peninsula would already be engaged at Anzac and Helles, it was believed that these reinforcements would have to be brought down from Bulair, some thirty miles away. Yet it was unwise to count on more than fifteen or twenty hours’ respite; from the moment the first Allied soldier put his foot ashore the Turks would be on the march. Everything in their bitter three months’ experience in Gallipoli had made it plain to Hamilton’s headquarters that once the period of surprise was gone there was very little chance of breaking the enemy line. Every hour, even every minute, counted.

Stopford demurred. He would do his best, he said, but there was no guarantee that he could reach the hills by daylight.

Hamilton does not appear to have pressed the point; he was content, he said, to leave it to Stopford’s own discretion as to how far he got inland in the first attack. This was a drastic watering-down of the spirit of the original plan, and it had its effect when Stopford came to pass on his instructions to his divisional commanders. The orders which General Hammersley issued to the 11th Division contained no references to speed: the brigade commanders were merely instructed to reach the hills ‘if possible’. Hammersley, indeed, seems to have gone into action in complete misunderstanding of his role in the battle; instead of regarding himself as a support to Birdwood’s main attack from Anzac he thought — and actually stated in his orders — that one of the objects of the Anzac attack was to distract the Turks from Suvla Bay while the 11th Division was getting ashore.

General Hammersley was not the only man who was in ignorance of the real objects of the offensive. An extreme secrecy was maintained by G.H.Q. at Imbros up to the very last moment.

Hamilton felt very strongly about this question of security, for he had bitter memories of the indiscretions of the Egyptian Press before the April landing. He feared the exposure of his plan by many means: by garrulous cabinet Ministers in England, by the Greek caiques that were constantly arriving in the islands from the mainland and slipping away again, by wounded officers who, on being invalided back to Egypt, might talk too freely in hospital. There was even a danger that some soldier who knew what was on foot might be captured on Gallipoli and induced by the Turks to give the show away.

In view of all this the plan was confined to a very small group at G.H.Q. throughout June and July, and Hamilton was even cautious in his letters to Kitchener. In the middle of July he sent a sharp telegram to Corps Headquarters at Anzac when he heard that Birdwood had been discussing the matter with General Godley and General Walker. ‘I am sorry you have told your divisional generals,’ he wrote. ‘I have not even informed Stopford or Bailloud (the French corps commander who had succeeded Gouraud). Please find out at once how many staff officers each of them has told, and let me know. Now take early opportunity of telling your divisional generals that whole plan is abandoned. I leave it to you to invent the reason for this abandonment. The operation is secret and must remain secret.’

Stopford himself knew nothing of the plan until three weeks before it was to be put into effect, and it was not until the last week of July that Hammersley was given his orders; Stopford took him up the coast in a destroyer to survey the intended landing places from the sea. On July 30 the brigadiers were briefed at last, and on August 3—three days before the battle was to begin — the brigadiers and their colonels were allowed a quick glimpse of the beaches from the decks of a destroyer. All other reconnaissance from the sea was forbidden lest the suspicions of the Turks should be aroused, and when finally the 11th Division embarked for the landing on August 6 many of its officers had never seen a map of Suvla Bay.

It was an excess of caution and it was not wise. Liman von Sanders says that in any case he was warned. Early in July he began to hear rumours from the islands that another landing was imminent: some 50,000 men and 140 ships were said to have been assembled at Lemnos. On July 22—the same day that Hamilton was breaking the secret to Stopford — Liman received a telegram from Supreme Headquarters in Germany. ‘From reports received here,’ it ran, ‘it seems probable that at the beginning of August a strong attack will be made on the Dardanelles, perhaps in connection with a landing on the Gulf of Saros (the Bulair area), or on the coast of Asia Minor. It will be well to economize ammunition.’

Liman himself was inclined to agree with this forecast, and he deployed his army accordingly. He now had a force of sixteen small divisions (which was roughly equivalent to Hamilton’s thirteen), and three of these he posted at Bulair, three opposite the Anzac bridgehead, five at Cape Helles, and the remaining three at Kum Kale on the Asiatic side of the straits. As for the Suvla area, the British were very nearly right in their estimate of the Turkish garrison there. Liman did not consider it a danger point, and he stationed only three weak battalions — about 1,800 men — around the bay. They had no barbed wire and no machine-guns.

There were then three main Turkish battle groups on the peninsula: the Bulair force in the north commanded by Feizi Bey, the force opposite Anzac in the centre commanded by Essad Pasha, and the southern force at Cape Helles commanded by Wehib Pasha (a younger brother of Essad Pasha). Mustafa Kemal was in a somewhat dubious position at this time. Liman respected him very much as a soldier, and would have promoted him, but he found him quarrelsome and difficult to control. A major row had developed in June when Enver, arriving on one of his periodical visits from Constantinople, cancelled an attack which Kemal had planned to launch on Anzac. Kemal, he said, was too much given to the squandering of troops, and Kemal at once resigned. Liman managed to restore peace between them, but when the attack turned out to be a complete disaster recriminations broke out afresh. Kemal declared that Enver’s interference had spoiled his plans, and Enver retaliated by making an address to the soldiers in which he praised them for the way they had fought under such poor leadership. It was another and violent example of the ‘jealousy and lack of co-operation so common among Turkish general officers’. Kemal once more resigned in a sour rage, and it was only when Enver left the peninsula that he calmed down and agreed to continue with his division — the old 19th. He was still with it on the north of the Anzac front in August, a senior divisional commander but no more.

It seems possible that Liman was to some extent taken in by the British feint on the island of Mytilene, the ancient Lesbos, for it was very thoroughly done. In July British officers made ostentatious inquiries among the local population of Turks and Greeks about the water supply and sites for encampments; and a little later a brigade of troops actually arrived. Maps of the Asiatic coast were freely distributed through the Army, and on August 3 Hamilton himself came over to the island to inspect the troops: an indication they were on the eve of going into battle, as indeed they were, but not in Asia. These moves can hardly have failed to have been reported to the Turks, for there were many people on the island who were hostile to the Allies, and a fantasy of espionage and counter-espionage was going on. In particular there was one family named Vassilaki of two brothers and three alleged beautiful sisters, which was the talk of the islands. The brothers kept eluding the British intelligence officers, and it was all very enjoyable in an opéra bouffe kind of way.

Bird wood’s plan of deception at Anzac was of a more practical nature and very daring. There were a number of miners in the Australian forces, and these threw out an underground tunnel, over 500 yards in length, in no-man’s-land at Lone Pine.[25] From this the Australians planned to issue forth like disturbed ants at zero hour on the afternoon of August 6. A more elaborate scheme had been worked out to pave the way for the main assault on Chunuk Bair that night. For some weeks almost every night a destroyer had posted herself off Anzac, and with the aid of her searchlights had bombarded a line of Turkish trenches known as Post 3. This action always began precisely at 9 p.m. and continued for half an hour, and it was calculated that the Turks, being human, would fall into a habit of retiring from the trench at 9 p.m. and of returning to it when the bombardment was over. On the night of the attack the Anzac troops planned to creep up to the position in the deep darkness on either side of the searchlight’s beam and then leap into the empty trenches directly the barrage was lifted.

But Birdwood’s main concern was the secret disembarkment at Anzac of his additional 25,000 men with their stores and equipment. In every valley which was not overlooked by the enemy long terraces were dug and new caves were driven into the rocks. Here the incoming troops were to be secreted. Orders were issued that the men, on reaching the shore, were to remain in strict hiding throughout the day, no swimming was allowed until after nightfall, and if German aircraft passed over they were not to turn their faces to the sky. No boat with the reinforcements on board was to approach the shore in the daylight, none was to be in sight of land when dawn broke. In the darkness tens of thousands of gallons of water had to be pumped ashore, new hospitals, ammunition dumps, guns and food stores hidden away. All horses were to be landed with full nosebags, and each man was to carry a full waterbottle and one day’s iron ration.

The movement began on August 4 and continued on three successive nights until August 6. Except that on one occasion a group of lighters was delayed until after dawn and was shelled and driven away the operation was carried out with complete success. There were moments at Birdwood’s headquarters when they felt sure that the Turks must have heard the rattling of anchor chains in the bay, and the shouted orders of the officers on the beach. But the enemy apparently suspected nothing. By August 6 there was scarcely standing room for another man at Anzac.

Meanwhile the last reinforcements from England were arriving in the islands, and it was already something of a victory that all five divisions were brought through the Mediterranean without the loss of a single man. They moved into tented cities on Mytilene, Lemnos and Imbros, and there they waited, in the eyes of the veterans a pale and hesitant lot, for the moment when they were to be re-embarked and taken to the battle.

It was a strange atmosphere. Among the older soldiers on the peninsula the approaching struggle had acted as a stimulus. Fewer and fewer men reported sick, and everything which in idleness had seemed so insupportable — the flies, the heat and the dust — became apparently much easier to bear. But for the new troops this period of suspense was a depressing experience. They were in a half-way house; while they themselves had never been in battle they still did not have the luxury of the ignorance in which the older soldiers had set out to make the first landing on April 25. They knew what the veterans had not known — that a landing could be a terrible thing, that the Turks were a stubborn enemy, and that all might easily end in wounds or death. This was no jaunt to Constantinople and the harems. It so happened that the War Office had published Hamilton’s first dispatch from Gallipoli just at the time that the new drafts were leaving England, and they had all been discussing that tragic story on the voyage out. And so they knew and did not know. Whenever they could they asked tentative questions of the older soldiers. What was it like on the peninsula? Would there be guides to lead them when they got ashore, and if no guides how would they know where to go? What about the shelling? And the sniping? And the Turks? And finally there was the question they could not ask: what was it like to kill a man and to stand up to be killed oneself?

All this was as old as war itself, but these early August days were frightfully hot, the flies and the mosquitoes leapt on to the men’s pink skins and they caught the endemic dysentery very quickly. While they waited they gossiped, and the rumours that went about were not of the hopeful kind. By August 6 the constricting sense of endless waiting had become as bad as if not worse than the prospect of the battle itself. They wanted to get it over.

Upon G.H.Q. at Imbros the strain was of a different kind, for it was perfectly obvious to everybody that this was a gambler’s chance, and probably their last chance. Mentally they might have persuaded themselves that, within reason, every eventuality had been foreseen, that the plan was good, that there was no reason why it should not succeed; but when so many things had gone wrong before it was difficult to feel an emotional enthusiasm. Hamilton was always at his best at these moments. He was courteous, patient, and apparently full of intelligent confidence; he spread an aura of authority round him, he was very much respected. But the crust was thin, and not unnaturally there were occasional disputes at headquarters. The French were not entirely liked, nor were the newcomers who were arriving from England. The staff, too, was on guard against any show of superiority in officers who were serving at the front, and they were often irritated as well by the men in the rear echelons behind them.

Despite the reinforcements, there was still a feeling that the Dardanelles was a poor relation to the French front, and an interminable telegram battle with the War Office went on. In July Churchill had been expected to come to Gallipoli, and he was awaited with much eagerness. At the last moment, however, the visit was blocked by Churchill’s political opponents in cabinet, and Colonel Maurice Hankey, the Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, was sent out instead. Hamilton at first found it difficult to suppress a feeling of antipathy towards this relatively junior officer who was to report directly to the cabinet at home, and it was not until Hankey had been a week or more on Imbros that the staff realized that he was anxious only to use his exceptional talents for their good.

Mackenzie records an odd scene when he was lunching one day with the generals at their mess at G.H.Q. ‘The one next to me,’ he says, ‘was Sir Frederick Stopford, a man of great kindliness and personal charm, whose conversation at lunch left me at the end of the meal completely without hope of victory at Suvla. The reason for this apprehension was his inability to quash the new General opposite, who was one of the Brigadiers in his Army Corps. This Brigadier was holding forth almost truculently about the folly of the plan of operations drawn up by the General Staff, while Sir Frederick Stopford appeared to be trying to reassure him in a fatherly way. I looked along the table to where Aspinall and Dawnay (two of Hamilton’s general staff officers) were sitting near General Braithwaite; but they were out of earshot and the dogmatic Brigadier continued unchallenged to enumerate the various military axioms which were being ignored by the Suvla plan of operations. For one thing, he vowed, most certainly he was not going to advance a single yard until all the Divisional Artillery was ashore. I longed for Sir Frederick to rebuke his disagreeable and discouraging junior; but he was deprecating, courteous, fatherly, anything except the Commander of an Army Corps which had been entrusted with a major operation that might change the whole course of the war in twenty-four hours.’

Hamilton’s position at this time is difficult to understand, for by now he had broken nearly all the rules which were subsequently evolved by Field-Marshal Montgomery in the second world war for operations of this kind. He had allowed his junior commanders to criticize and change his plan, and he had never conveyed to them by word of mouth exactly what he wanted them to do. Instead of keeping the control of the battle under his own hand, his generals and brigadiers were to act on their own discretion; they were to get forward ‘if possible’. In the same way Hamilton had failed to impress his will on Kitchener and the War Office; he had not wanted these new commanders, they were charming men of his own world, but they were old and they had a fatal lack of experience. Nevertheless, he had accepted them. What was wanted was young commanders with seasoned troops, but at Suvla it was the other way about.

Had Hamilton but known it there existed in his Army a man of quite exceptional ability who would have been the ideal commander for the Suvla operation. This was a brigadier-general named John Monash. Monash is something of an enigma in the first world war, for although Hamilton had noticed that he was an able officer, no one, either at Imbros or at Anzac or anywhere else, seems to have divined his peculiar talents as a leader. He was an Australian Jew, already fifty years of age, and his attainments were extraordinary: he was a Doctor of Engineering, and had also graduated in Arts and Law, in addition to being deeply read in music, in medicine and in German literature. Soldiering had been merely a hobby for Monash but for years he had been enthusiastic about it, and when he had volunteered for service at the outbreak of the war he had been made a colonel. He took a brigade ashore at Anzac in the April landing, and had since done well within the limits of that narrow front, but he had not advanced beyond the rank of brigadier.

This was the man who was soon to rise to the command of an army corps in France, and who towards the end of the war was to be considered as a possible successor to Haig as Commander-in-Chief of all the British Armies in France.

‘Unfortunately,’ Lloyd George wrote in his memoirs, ‘the British did not bring into prominence any commander who, taking all round, was more conspicuously fitted for this post (than Haig). No doubt Monash would, if the opportunity had been given him, have risen to the height of it, but the greatness of his abilities was not brought to the attention of the cabinet in any of the Despatches. Professional soldiers could hardly be expected to advertise the fact that the greatest strategist in the Army was a civilian when the war began, and that they were being surpassed by a man who had not received any of their advantages in training and teaching… Monash was… the most resourceful general in the whole British Army.’

But in August 1915 no one had thought of Monash in such terms as these, and indeed he had never been heard of outside his own narrow circle. In the coming battle he was confined to the role of taking one of the Anzac columns on a roundabout route up Sari Bair.

The plan itself was open to serious criticism; except for the Suvla landing it did not force the Turks to react to the British, it was the British who were reacting to the Turks. They were proposing to direct their main attack upon Chunuk Bair, the enemy’s strongest point, and it was not to be one concentrated blow on a broad manageable front, but the most congested of battles in which only a few men could take part at one time, and in the most difficult country where anything and everything could go wrong. The Anzac bridgehead was perfectly safe, and the Turks never had a hope of dislodging the Allies from it. It was an ideal training ground, and the new troops coming out from the United Kingdom might very well have been put in there to hold the line while the main attack was delivered not at Chunuk Bair but at Suvla.

The Australians and New Zealanders were by now the most aggressive fighters in the whole peninsula. They had not been heavily engaged through June and July like the British and the French at Cape Helles. They were eager for action, they wanted space and movement after all these claustrophobic months under the ground, and the Suvla landing, with a broad flanking movement round Sari Bair, was precisely the sort of adventure to which they would have responded. They knew the ground — from their perches in the bridgehead they looked down on it every day — they knew the Turks, and their commanders had all the experience of the April landing behind them.

But apparently neither Hamilton nor Birdwood ever contemplated this course, and it was left to the new soldiers who had never been to war before — who had never been abroad before — to land on the strange dark shore against a trained enemy, without knowing clearly what they had to do. And that perhaps was asking too much.

Yet when all this is said it has to be remembered that very similar errors were committed all over again in the second world war especially in the Italian campaign, and with almost painful fidelity at the time of the landing at Anzio, south of Rome, in 1944. At Gallipoli nothing was yet established, nothing was clear, not even the one principle that the campaign itself was already revealing — that everything which was done by stealth and imagination was a success, while everything that was done by means of the headlong frontal attack was foredoomed to failure. Hamilton was beset by problems that seldom became so acute in the second world war: the rub of the old Regular Army ideas against the new soldier; the preoccupation of the high command with the other front in France; the novelty of the whole conception of an amphibious operation; the hazards of maintaining morale among the troops of so many different nationalities in that distant and difficult place.

Yet despite the hesitations of the new commanders and the complications of the plan there were very good hopes of success as the first week of August ran out. The tired troops at Cape Helles were very ready to try again. At Anzac the spirit of the soldiers was high. The Fleet was more than eager; and the weather held good. Moreover, the Turks on their side were just as prone to error as the British, just as uncertain and no better equipped. Liman at this stage had no new ideas, no clear view of how he might gain the victory. He could think of nothing but to reinforce, to dig in and to hold on. Admiral von Usedom, the German commander of the defences of the Dardanelles, wrote to the Kaiser on July 30: ‘How long the Fifth Army can hold the enemy is more than I can prophesy. If no ammunition comes through from Germany, it can only be a question of a short time… it is a matter of life and death. The opinion of the Turkish General Headquarters appears to me to incline to a hazardous optimism.’

The German Supreme Command was seriously disturbed about Liman von Sanders at this time. On July 26 they sent a message ordering him to hand over his command to Field-Marshal von der Goltz and to come home to Germany to report. Liman managed to stave off this decision, but he was forced to accept on his staff a certain Colonel von Lossow who was to keep an eye on his superior, and even take a hand in the planning of operations.

But the battle itself soon swallowed up all disagreements and doubts on either side. On August 4 Samson went out on a last reconnaissance over Suvla, and reported that no Turks were on the move there. A shell was fired into the gleaming white surface of the salt lake. This was an unauthorized act which annoyed Hamilton very much, but it did prove that men could walk and even ride a horse on the caked and salty mud. The last intelligence appreciations of the situation were issued to commanders, and some attempt was made to provide them with an idea of the kind of country they would encounter as they made their way inland; they would find water once they got to the hills, they were told, but their progress might be impeded by the thick six-foot high scrub that was cut only by goat tracks.

Nasmith set off on his August cruise which a few days later was to bring its first result in the sinking of the battleship Barbarossa Harradin. And in the islands the invasion fleet assembled: the black beetles, the Isle of Man paddle-steamers, the North Sea trawlers, the yachts, the Thames tugs, the drifters, the monitors, the cruisers and destroyers.

Only bad weather or a Turkish attack could now delay or change the plans. At zero hour de Robeck was to go to Suvla in his new flagship, the light cruiser Chatham, but Hamilton this time elected to remain on shore at Imbros, where he was connected by submarine telephone to Cape Helles, ten miles, and Anzac, fifteen miles, away.

August 6 was a day of calm, hard, glaring sunshine, and in the afternoon when the soldiers were embarking at Imbros they could clearly hear the roar of the guns at Anzac and Cape Helles where the battle had already begun. Bright little stabbing flashes sparkled in the sky. As night fell a few minutes after seven a brilliant crimson sunset expanded along the horizon. Then it was black darkness, with no light showing in the Fleet. The island with its thousands of empty tents and its silence took on an air of terrible desolation. ‘The day before the start is the worst day for a commander,’ Hamilton wrote. ‘The operation overhangs him as the thought of another sort of operation troubles the mind of a sick man in hospital.’ He was restless, and walked down to the beach to see the 11th Division go off. The men, packed like herrings in the beetles and on the decks of the destroyers, were silent and listless: ‘These new men seem subdued when I recall the blaze of enthusiasm in which the old lot started out of Mudros harbour on that April afternoon.’ For a moment he debated whether or not he should have cruised round the invasion fleet in a motor launch, saying a few encouraging words to each unit as he went along, but he dismissed the idea when he remembered that the men did not know him by sight; and in any case several hours were to go by before they arrived on the beaches, and that was too long an interval for his words to survive.

He looked for Stopford and Reed, hoping that they might have done something to enthuse their soldiers, but they were nowhere to be seen; and he returned to his hut. Nothing to do but to wait.

Stopford had been lying on his valise spread out on the floor of his tent, and Colonel Aspinall found him there. The General had slipped and sprained his knee that morning and was not feeling very well. ‘I want you to tell Sir Ian Hamilton,’ he said, ‘that I am going to do my best, and that I hope to be successful. But he must realize that if the enemy proves to be holding a strong line of continuous entrenchments I shall be unable to dislodge him till more guns are landed.’ Glumly he went on to quote his chief-of-staff: ‘All the teaching of the campaign in France,’ he said, ‘proves that continuous trenches cannot be attacked without the assistance of large numbers of howitzers.’

He rose soon afterwards, and getting aboard the Jonquil with Rear-Admiral Christian, steamed away.

In the darkness Hamilton strolled down to the beach again and saw the ships moving, ghostlike and silent, to the boom across the mouth of the harbour. ‘This empty harbour frightens me,’ he wrote later. ‘Nothing in legend is stranger or more terrible than the silent departure of this silent Army.’

Then he went back to his tent to keep a vigil with his telephones through the night.