Gallipoli

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

AT Anzac on August 6 there was no confusion over the plans; the commanders knew exactly what they had to do. During the afternoon the Australians were to attack at Lone Pine in the south of the bridgehead, so as to give the Turks the impression that the main assault was coming from that direction, and then, after nightfall, the bulk of Birdwood’s forces were to march up the ravines towards Sari Bair. They hoped to take the crest of the ridge by morning.

The charge at Lone Pine was a particularly desperate adventure, since it was to take place in broad daylight and on a narrow front of only 220 yards where the Turks could concentrate their fire. Yet the soldiers believed in the plan. They believed in it so well and were so eager to fight that guards had to be posted in the rear trenches to prevent unauthorized men from attempting to take part. This was a wise precaution, because when the fighting did begin it created a frenzy that was not far from madness, and men were to be seen offering sums of five pounds or more for the privilege of getting a place in the front line.

Through the midday hours the soldiers committed to the first assault filed quietly into the secret underground tunnel which had been dug about fifty yards in advance of the front line and parallel to it through no-man’s-land. The sandbags plugging the holes from which they were to emerge were loosened, and they lay waiting there in darkness and in fearful heat, while the artillery barrage thundered over their heads. At 5.30 p.m. whistles sounded the attack along the line. It was the strangest of battles; soldiers erupting from the ground into the bright sunlight, others leaping up from the trenches behind them, and all of them with shouts and yells running forward into the scrub. They had about a hundred yards to go, and when they arrived at the Turkish line they found that the trenches had been roofed over with heavy pine logs. Some of the men dropped their rifles and started to claw these logs aside with their hands, others simply fired down through the chinks into the Turks below, others again went running on to the open communication trenches and there they sprang down to take the enemy in the rear. In the semi-darkness under the pine logs there was very little space to shoot; on both sides they fought with bayonets and sometimes without any weapons at all, kicking and struggling on the ground, trying to throttle one another with their hands.

Although in after years the action at Lone Pine was very carefully chronicled — the attacks and counter-attacks that followed one another through the day and night for a week on end — it is not really possible to comprehend what happened. All dissolves into the confused impression of a riot, of a vicious street-fight in the back alleys of a city, and the metaphor of the stirred-up ant-heap persists; it was the same frantic movement to and fro, the agitated jerking and rushing and the apparent absence of all meaning except that contained in the idea of mutual destruction. It was the kind of fighting which General Stopford could hardly have understood.

Seven Victoria Crosses were won at Lone Pine, and in the first few days’ fighting alone something like 4,000 men were killed there. On this first evening, however, the important thing was that by 6 p.m. the Australians had captured the Turkish front line and were resisting every effort to turn them out. If they did not altogether deceive Essad Pasha as to the true direction of Birdwood’s main attack, at least they made it impossible for him to obtain reinforcements from this part of his line. By nightfall the way was clear for the main assault on Sari Bair ridge to begin.

Mustafa Kemal made one error in his anticipation of Birdwood’s plan; he did not believe that the British would ever have attempted to climb these hills by night. Yet here again the commanders were very confident. A New Zealand major named Overton had been secretly reconnoitring the ground through the latter part of July and early August, and he had organized a troop of guides who were to lead the soldiers over the fantastically broken country to their objectives. They had an excellent map of the area which had been taken from the dead body of a Turkish officer after the May 19 assault. Twenty thousand men, under the command of Major-General Godley, were to be engaged, and they were divided into two columns. The first of these, made up chiefly of New Zealanders, was to advance up Sazlidere and a neighbouring ravine to the top of Chunuk Bair. The second, comprising British, Australian and Indian troops, was to march on a roundabout course to the north of the bridgehead, where it was to split into two halves for the assault of Hill Q and Koja Chemen Tepe.

The first column’s offensive opened brilliantly soon after night had fallen. Faithfully at 9 p.m. the British destroyer shelled the Turks at Old Post 3 in the usual way, and at 9.30 the New Zealanders rushing alongside the searchlight beam occupied the position before the enemy could get back to it. There developed almost at once some of the most brutal fighting of the campaign along the side of Sazlidere, but the Turks, as Kemal had predicted, were not strong enough to hold. They fell back along a ridge known to the British as Rhododendron Spur,[26] and for a time the New Zealanders found themselves advancing through unoccupied country behind the enemy lines. ‘It was a curious sensation,’ one of their officers related later, ‘to be marching along that valley in bright moonlight, far within the Turkish lines, without opposition of any kind. One Turk, who rushed out ahead of the advanced guard, I shot dead with my pistol. He was the only Turk seen that night.’

Soon after midnight, however, things began to go wrong. The guides faltered, stopped, and finally admitted they were lost. One part of the column having marched — or rather climbed and descended — all through the night found itself back at its starting point. The part which did succeed in finding its way to the top of Rhododendron Spur sat down to wait for the lost battalions, and when dawn broke the assault of the final summit of Chunuk Bair had still not begun.

But this was nothing to the difficulties in which the second column on the left found itself almost from the outset. The men had been set to march a distance of about three and a half miles in three hours, and no doubt it might have been done if they had been on a walking expedition in peacetime, and if they had travelled in daylight with good maps and without baggage of any kind. But many of them were weakened by months of dysentery, they were heavily burdened, it was very dark and they had to fight the Turks on the way. Moreover, the guides were so confident that at the last minute they chose to take a short cut. Instead of following the easy roundabout route on the low ground to the north, they led the column into a ravine at Aghyldere, and here the Turks poured down their fire upon them. At once the whole column came to a halt, and it was not very helpful that the men had been ordered to march with unloaded rifles so as to confine their fighting to the silent bayonet. In this wilderness there was now no silence, and there was no one whom they could see to bayonet. When the commanding officer was wounded panic began to spread along the line. Some of the men, believing the opposition to be far worse than it was, started to scatter and retreat; others pressed on in broken groups into dark valleys that led nowhere, and every ridge was the beginning of another ridge beyond. They were soon exhausted. Many of the men dropped in their tracks and fell asleep, and it was difficult for the officers to harry them on since they themselves were without orders, and were bewildered by the unaccountable delays in the movement of the column. It was like a caterpillar, undulating at the centre, but without forward motion, its head and tail rooted to the ground. Daylight on August 7 found them still groping about in the ravines; and the crests of Hill Q and Koja Chemen Tepe, which they had hoped to rush at 3 a.m., were a mile or more away.

There was still one more forfeit to pay for the folly of attempting this night march. In the expectation that the Sari Bair ridge would have fallen by dawn it had been arranged that the Australian Light Horse should carry out a frontal attack just below Kemal’s headquarters on Battleship Hill, so as to prevent the enemy from enfilading on that flank. The Light Horsemen were an aggressive lot, and Birdwood at one stage had even contemplated putting them back on their horses so that they could make a cavalry charge into the rear of the Turkish lines, somewhat in the manner of the Light Brigade in the Crimean campaign. That colourful idea, however, had been dismissed, and the Light Horsemen now found themselves dismounted in the trenches below Battleship Hill. The Sari Bair ridge had not been taken but they decided to charge just the same. ‘You have ten minutes to live,’ one of the officers said to his men while they waited, and this proved to be very nearly accurate, for it did not take the Turks long to destroy 650 out of the 1,250 who came over the top, one wave following another, the living stumbling for a few seconds over the bodies of the dead until they too were dead. Only a handful reached the Turkish trenches and there they fired their green and red rockets as the signal for the others to come on. But there were none to follow them.

Other small attacks along the line came to no better end and an unnatural quiet began to spread along the front through the early hours of the morning of August 7. On the Turkish side the commanders had survived the surprise of the first shock of the offensive, but they had had no time as yet to re-group their men to meet the next assault. The British, like the crew of a ship which has barely weathered a bad storm in the night, were still dazed and uncertain. Those New Zealanders who had gained the crest of Rhododendron Spur looked down and saw far below them to the north-west Stopford’s soldiers strolling about in the sunshine at Suvla Bay. From the lefthand Anzac column, still beleaguered in the hills, there was no sound; nor was there any movement in the direction of Battleship Hill, since the Australian attack here had failed and so many were dead. The fight at Lone Pine further to the south was still going on, but apart from this the battle had stopped. Not unnaturally the New Zealanders began to feel isolated in their high perch under Chunuk Bair — they alone seemed to have penetrated into the enemy lines, and there was no knowing whether or not they were about to be entirely cut off. There was still no sign of the other units who were expected to join them there, and the plan was now running many hours behind schedule.

Presently, however, two companies of Gurkhas who had been lost all night came straggling up the spur, and with these reinforcements the New Zealanders made a rush for the summit of Chunuk Bair in the middle of this morning of August 7. It was several hours too late. By now a German Colonel named Kannengiesser had arrived on the hilltop, and although he was wounded he roused the Turkish outpost there and they drove back the attack. This was the last heavy fighting on Anzac on August 7. The rest of the day went by while the left hand column extricated itself from the frightful muddle it had got into during the night, and nothing more could be done on Rhododendron Spur until the New Zealanders were reinforced.

General Godley now decided to reorganize his force for a new attack at dawn on August 8. Through the night five columns were assembled, and their objectives were the same as before — the three main peaks on Sari Bair. It was a confused affair, for the troops were still not properly rested or supplied — most of them had been wandering about half the night in the hopeless maze of gullies and ravines, and had not even reached the start line when the attack began. But there were two encouraging events: a British Major named Allanson, in command of a battalion of Gurkhas, found himself far out in front near the centre of the line, and instead of waiting for support to reach him he elected to go on and see whether he could take Hill Q on his own initiative. He very nearly succeeded. It chanced that he struck a gap in the enemy defences, and he had actually advanced to within 300 feet of the crest before he was fired on. He then scrambled back down the cliffs in search of reinforcements, and having gathered in some British infantry managed to hoist his little force another hundred feet towards his goal: and there they perched all day on ledges and crannies in the rocks under the fire of Turkish snipers, until, at dusk, they clambered on to a better position a little higher up. It was not so much fighting as mountaineering. They were quite cut off, and at Godley’s headquarters that night nothing was known about them.

The other success was on Chunuk Bair, and here too there was another inexplicable gap in the Turkish line. A Lieut.-Colonel Malone made a rush for the summit with two companies of New Zealanders, and they surprised the Turkish outpost there asleep. One does not know why it was that these exhausted Turks had not been relieved or reinforced, but it was so, and Malone and his New Zealanders contrived to dig in just below the crest. But they had very little chance of survival: there was no cover on the open hilltop, and from either side the Turks shot shells and machine-gun bullets into them all through the day. Several times the Gloucestershire regiment and others tried to get through to them without success, and when night fell Malone and nearly all his men were dead.

Thus on the evening of August 8, forty-eight hours after the offensive had begun, the Allies had reached none of their main objectives. The Suvla plan, which was a good plan, had failed because the wrong commanders and soldiers had been employed, and at Anzac the best officers and men were employed upon a plan that would not work. And both attacks had been bedevilled at the outset by the difficulties of advancing through a strange country in the night. Even at Helles the battle had gone wrong, for the British there had launched their diversionary attack against Krithia at the very moment when the Turks were also massing for an assault. And so the Allies were thrown back to their own trenches with heavy casualties and apparently nothing gained.

It was the nadir of the campaign. And yet in a perverse way, when everything seemed to have gone wrong, when the vital element of surprise had been lost, a change was taking place at this instant and hope began again. It came chiefly from the commanders. Hamilton was now at Suvla, arguing, persuading, and finally insisting that the new army should march to the hills, and something of the same sort was happening at Anzac. Birdwood and Godley were a long way from abandoning their offensive. Instead they simplified it: they planned still another dawn attack on August 9, but this time they ignored Koja Chemen Tepe and aimed simply for Chunuk Bair and the narrow saddle of land connecting it to Hill Q — the point where Allanson and a little handful of survivors were still clinging to the cliffs. The main assault was entrusted to a General Baldwin, who was in command of four British battalions which had not yet taken part in the battle. At 4.30 a.m. in the first light of the morning every gun at Anzac, at sea or on the shore, was to fire at the crestline, and at 5.15 a.m. the infantry were to get up and charge.

The night again passed in comparative quiet at the front, but with much agitated movement behind the lines. General Baldwin was particularly unlucky. He was given two guides who were supposed to be reliable, but they led him and his column at first in one direction and then in another, until eventually they finished up against the blank wall of a precipice. When the guns opened up at 4.30 a.m. Baldwin was still roaming about some distance from the front, and three quarters of an hour later, when he should have been attacking, he was only beginning to march in the right direction. The rest of the line went into the assault without him, and it was a slow uncertain movement. Perhaps it ought never to have been begun with troops who were so tired and so utterly confused, perhaps Birdwood and his staff were no longer making any sense out of their maps and plans and were guided only by a dull persistence. Yet the crest was very near; so long as there was any hope they had to try again. And in fact, in the most unexpected way, their hope was justified.

Major Allanson, on his eyrie on the ridge, had made contact with the main body of the British during the night and had obtained a reinforcement of Lancashire troops for the new attack — a total of about 450 men in all. He had his orders direct from General Godley: he was to keep his head down until the bombardment was over and then he was to rush the Turkish trenches on the ridge.

‘I had only fifteen minutes left,’ Allanson wrote in the report he made two days later. ‘The roar of the artillery preparation was enormous; the hill, which was almost perpendicular, seemed to leap underneath one. I recognized that if we flew up the hill the moment it stopped, we ought to get to the top. I put the three (Lancashire) companies into the trenches among my men, and said that the moment they saw me go forward carrying a red flag, everyone was to start. I had my watch out, 5.15. I never saw such artillery preparation; the trenches were being torn to pieces; the accuracy was marvellous, as we were only just below. At 5.18 it had not stopped, and I wondered if my watch was wrong. 5.20 silence. I waited three minutes to be certain, great as the risk was. Then off we dashed, all hand in hand, a most perfect advance, and a wonderful sight… At the top we met the Turks; Le Marchand was down, a bayonet through the heart. I got one through the leg, and then for about what appeared to be ten minutes, we fought hand to hand, we bit and fisted, and used rifles and pistols as clubs; and then the Turks turned and fled, and I felt a very proud man; the key of the whole peninsula was ours, and our losses had not been so very great for such a result. Below I saw the straits, motors and wheeled transport on the roads leading to Achi Baba. As I looked round I saw that we were not being supported, and thought I could help best by going after those who had retreated in front of us. We dashed down towards Maidos, but had only got about 100 feet down when suddenly our own Navy put six twelve-inch monitor shells into us, and all was terrible confusion. It was a deplorable disaster; we were obviously mistaken for Turks, and we had to get back. It was an appalling sight: the first hit a Gurkha in the face: the place was a mass of blood and limbs and screams, and we all flew back to the summit and to our old position just below. I remained on the crest with about fifteen men; it was a wonderful view; below were the straits, reinforcements coming over from the Asia Minor side, motor-cars flying. We commanded Kilid Bahr, and the rear of Achi Baba and the communications to all their Army there.’

There is some doubt about the shells that fell on Allanson. The Navy deny that they were theirs, and even those soldiers who, from just below, were observers of the skirmish, were not quite certain what had happened. They saw that Allanson, on reaching the summit, had caught the Turks in the open as they were running back to their trenches after the bombardment. They saw the hand-to-hand fighting with the bayonet, and at the end of it they saw the excited and triumphant figures of the Gurkhas and the British waving on the skyline.[27] Then as they disappeared over the other side the thunderclap occurred, but it was impossible to know the direction from which the shells had come or who had fired them.

Yet the incident was not absolutely disastrous. Allanson was still on the top, and although wounded was prepared to hold on there until reinforcements arrived. And it was indeed a wonderful view, the best that any Allied soldier had ever had on Gallipoli. After three and a half months of the bitterest fighting the Turks were now displaced from the heights, and in effect their army was cut in half. ‘Koja Chemen Tepe not yet,’ Hamilton wrote in his diary. ‘But Chunuk Bair will do: with that, we win.’

Liman von Sanders had had an exasperating time during these first three days of the battle. He was at Gallipoli town on the evening of August 6 when he first heard of the break-out from Anzac and the Suvla landing, and he seems to have appreciated very rapidly that his expectations had been wrong — that the Allies had no intention of landing either at Bulair or in Asia, and were in fact putting their main attack into the centre of the peninsula itself. The Bulair group, consisting of the 7th and the 12th Turkish divisions under Ahmed Feizi Bey, was standing by in reserve at the neck of the peninsula, and he ordered it to get ready to move. At the same time two of the divisions in Asia were told to come up to Chanak so that they could cross to Gallipoli in boats. Still another division was instructed to move round to the north of the Anzac bridgehead where the attack appeared to be growing more and more menacing.

Feizi Bey had been ill, and he was asleep in bed when he was woken at a quarter to two in the morning on August 7 with an order to march his two divisions south with all speed to Suvla. Soon after daylight the first battalions were on the road — they had a distance of some thirty-five miles to go — and Feizi Bey went on ahead by car to reconnoitre the position at the front. Towards two in the afternoon he found Liman at the village of Yalova, just north of the Narrows, and a conference was held around a small table at the local police station. It was apparent by now that a major landing had taken place at Suvla, and that Willmer with his three battalions could not be expected to hold out much longer. How long would it be before the Saros group arrived? Feizi Bey was anxious to please and he committed the error of saying not what he knew to be true but what he believed Liman wanted to hear. The soldiers, he said, were making a double march; they would arrive before the end of the afternoon. Liman was much surprised and pleased at this, and at once ordered that an attack should be made on Suvla at dawn on the following day.

After the conference Feizi Bey abandoned his car and set off on horseback into the hills. Sunset found him at Willmer’s headquarters on the heights above the Suvla plain, and it was there that he learned that he had been much too optimistic: his troops were still on the road a long way to the north. However, he continued to hope that he would be able to give battle in the morning, and he sat up all night with his staff drawing up his plans.

Before daybreak on August 8 Liman rode out towards the Suvla plain to watch the attack, and was a good deal annoyed to find that nothing whatever was happening. No soldiers had reached the startline, and except for the British clustering around the Suvla beaches there was no sign of movement anywhere. After an hour or two a staff officer turned up and explained that there had been a delay — the Bulair troops could not be expected for several hours. Liman curtly ordered the attack to be put in at sunset and went off to see what was happening at Anzac.

At 2 p.m. Feizi Bey had a conference with his staff, and they agreed that it was now too late for anything to be done that day; the men were exhausted after their long march, many had still not arrived, and to attack across exposed ground with the setting sun shining in their eyes would mean certain disaster. The battle was put off until dawn on the following day, August 9.

Liman was extremely impatient when he heard this news. He said over the telephone that the situation had become very serious, and that it was absolutely essential that the Saros group should attack that night. Willmer’s small forces might crack at any moment and the British would gain the heights. Feizi Bey replied he would do what he could but he was back on the telephone to Liman again a little later. An immediate attack, he said, was quite impossible. His generals were against it and so were his staff. The men had been without sleep for two nights, they were short of guns and supplies of every kind. They were without water. Tomorrow morning was the very earliest moment that a move could be made.

It was absurdly like the scene that was being played out at this instant just a few miles away on the Suvla coast between Hamilton and Stopford. Feizi’s arguments were precisely Stopford’s, and there was nothing that Hamilton was saying that Liman left unsaid. One has a glimpse of a strange pattern of enemies here. Had the circumstances permitted it, General Stopford and Feizi Bey might have found much to commune with together, for Stopford too had not enjoyed his harrying from G.H.Q. nor Hamilton’s direct interference in the battle. It even seems possible that Hamilton and Liman might have felt themselves closer to each other than to their reluctant generals, for they had a common emotion of frustration and impotence; each thought he was being baulked, not by bad luck or any fault in his plans, but by the incompetence of his corps commander.

Yet on balance Liman’s situation was worse than Hamilton’s — even much worse. Hamilton at least had his men on the spot, and at that moment was getting out orders for them to advance to the vital ridge at Tekke Tepe. At Anzac Birdwood was preparing still another onslaught on Sari Bair, and Allanson and the New Zealanders at the spearhead were getting ready for their final rush to the summit. The Turks on Chunuk Bair were in a more critical position than anyone on the British side had guessed. Their casualties had been appalling: one after another the senior officers had been killed or wounded, and they had been forced to put a certain Lieut.-Colonel Potrih in command. He can hardly have been a really useful commander, for he was the Director of Railways at Constantinople, and it was only by chance that he was visiting the front at this moment. Then too, in the course of the fighting the battalions had become scarcely less mixed up than the British, and their battle order was now chaotic. A stream of agitated messages was coming in from the junior officers in the line. ‘An attack has been ordered on Chunuk Bair,’ one message ran. ‘To whom should I give this order? I am looking for the battalion commanders but I cannot find them. Everything is in a muddle.’ And again: ‘I have received no information about what is going on. All the officers are killed and wounded. I do not even know the name of the place where I am. I cannot see anything by observation. I request in the name of the safety of the nation that an officer be appointed who knows the area well.’ And still again—‘At dawn some troops withdrew from Sahinsirt towards Chunuk Bair and they are digging in on Chunuk Bair but it is not known whether they are friends or enemies.’

These were the men upon whom Allanson was preparing to rush at first light in the morning.

At Helles too things had suddenly become very sinister for the Turks. Although the British did not know it, their holding attack had extended the Turkish defence to the edge of its endurance, and the German chief-of-staff there had lost his nerve. He had sent a signal to Liman urging that the whole tip of the peninsula should be abandoned — that the troops there should be evacuated across the Dardanelles to Asia ‘while there is still time to extricate them’.

But Liman’s methods were a good deal more ruthless than those of the British Commander-in-Chief, and in this triple crisis he acted very promptly. He removed the German chief-of-staff from his post at Cape Helles, and instructed the commanding general there that in no circumstances whatever was a single yard of ground to be given up. As for the unfortunate Feizi Bey, who had failed to make his attack at Suvla, he was dismissed out of hand. He was woken out of his sleep at 11 p.m. that night and bundled off to Constantinople. A new command was created embracing the whole battle area from Chunuk Bair to Suvla, and it was given to Mustafa Kemal.

In his account of the campaign Liman gives no explanation of why his choice fell on Kemal. He simply says, ‘That evening I gave command of all the troops in the Anafarta section to Colonel Mustafa Kemal… I had full confidence in his energy.’ Yet it was a surprising appointment to make. One can only conclude that Liman had long since divined Kemal’s abilities, but had been prevented by Enver from promoting him. But now in this extreme crisis he could afford to ignore Enver.

Kemal had been in the heaviest of the fighting on the Anzac front from the beginning. His 19th Division had met the first shock of the New Zealand advance; it had demolished the Australian Light Horse on August 7 and it had been fighting night and day ever since. In Kemal’s view the Turkish position had, by then, become ‘extremely delicate’, and he told Liman’s chief-of-staff so over the telephone on August 8. Unless something was quickly done to straighten out the tangle on Chunuk Bair, he said, they might be forced to evacuate the whole ridge. A unified command on the front was essential. ‘There is no other course,’ he went on, ‘but to put all the available troops under my command.’

Liman’s chief-of-staff at that stage had no notion that Kemal, who was always a troublesome figure at headquarters, was about to be promoted, and he permitted himself to say ironically, ‘Won’t that be too many troops?’

‘It will be too few,’ Kemal replied.

So now, after he had been awake for two nights at Anzac and continually in the front line, Kemal suddenly found himself in charge of the battle. He seems to have been not at all dismayed. Having calmly given orders to his successor in command of the 19th Division on Battleship Hill, he got on his horse and rode across the dark hills to Suvla. One has a vivid picture of him on this solitary midnight ride. Physically he was quite worn out, and his divisional doctor was giving him doses to keep him going. He had grown very thin, his eyes were bloodshot, his voice grating with fatigue, and the battle had brought him to a state of nervous tension which was perhaps not far from fanaticism, except that it was fanaticism of a cold and calculating kind.

With his doctor and an A.D.C. following on behind, he turned up at Willmer’s headquarters in the Suvla hills soon after midnight, and spent the next two hours making himself familiar with the front. No one was able to tell him very much about the movements of the British, but he decided to make a general attack along the whole line from Tekke Tepe to the Sari Bair ridge in the morning. The Bulair force had now arrived, and at 4 a.m. orders were sent out to the commanders telling them to be ready to start in half an hour; they were to advance directly to the heights and then charge down into the Suvla plain on the other side.

As dawn was about to break the Tekke Tepe ridge was still empty. The British 32nd Brigade had not got under way so promptly as Hamilton had hoped on the previous night. Seven hours had gone by while the men groped about in the thick scrub, constantly losing themselves in the winding goat tracks, and it was not until 3.30 a.m. that the brigade was assembled below the summit. At 4 a.m. it advanced at last, and it was just half an hour too late; as the men in the leading company went forward the Turks burst over the rise above them. It was a tumultuous charge, and it annihilated the British. Within a few minutes all their officers were killed, battalion and brigade headquarters were over-run, and men were scattering everywhere in wild disorder. In the intense heat of the machine-gun fire the scrub burst into flames, and the soldiers who had secreted themselves there came bolting into the open like rabbits, with the smoke and flames billowing out behind them. At sunrise Hamilton, watching from the deck of the Triad, was presented with an awful sight. His men were streaming back across the plain in thousands, and at 6 a.m., only an hour and a half after the battle had begun, there seemed to be a general collapse. Not only were the hills lost, but some of the soldiers in their headlong retreat did not stop until they reached the salt lake and the sea. ‘My heart has grown tough amidst the struggles of the peninsula,’ he wrote in his diary that night, ‘but the misery of this scene wellnigh broke it… Words are no use.’

Another two hours went by before the Turkish fire slackened and the British began to rally themselves on a line across the centre of the plain. Hamilton then went ashore to look for Stopford, who had landed overnight at a place called Ghazi Baba, close to the extreme tip of the northern arm of the bay. ‘We found Stopford,’ he says, ‘about four or five hundred yards to the east of Ghazi Baba, busy with part of a Field Company of engineers supervising the building of some splinterproof headquarters huts for himself and his staff. He was absorbed in the work, and he said it would be well to make a thorough good job of the dug-outs as we should probably be here for a very long time… As to this morning’s hold-up, Stopford took it very philosophically.’

And still the polite façade between the two men did not fail. Since headquarters was without news of the left flank on Kiretch Tepe Hamilton suggested that it might be a godd thing if he went off on a reconnaissance in that direction. Stopford agreed, but thought that he himself had better stay at headquarters to deal with the messages coming in. Upon this Hamilton set off with an A.D.C. on a long walk towards the hills and the Corps Commander returned to the building of his huts.

Later that day Stopford sent out a message to one of his divisional generals congratulating him on his stand. ‘Do not try any more today,’ he added, ‘unless the enemy gives you a favourable chance.’

Kemal had watched the battle from a hilltop behind the front line, and by midday he was satisfied that he had nothing more to fear from the British on the Suvla front. But by now alarming messages had reached him from Sari Bair: Allanson had gained the ridge and the centre of crisis had obviously shifted there. At 3 p.m. Kemal went off on horseback through the blazing heat, and having called in on Liman’s headquarters on the way, reached Chunuk Bair just as the evening light was failing. The situation there had grown worse. Allanson and his men had been withdrawn, but other British troops had taken up their positions on the hill; a fresh Turkish regiment which was due to come up from Helles had not arrived, and the troops in the line were to some extent demoralized by the British artillery fire and the continuing strain of the battle. Kemal, who was now spending his fourth night on his feet, at once ordered an attack for four-thirty on the following morning, August 10. His staff protested that the men were incapable of further effort, but Kemal merely repeated his order and went off on a personal reconnaissance along the front.

It was the last gasp of the battle, the final spasm that was to decide the issue one way or another. On both sides the men had been fighting for three days and nights without sleep, and with very little water or food. The trenches behind them were choked with dead and wounded, and most of those who were still living looked out on their hideous surroundings through a fog of exhaustion. They lay on the ground, they waited, and they responded to their orders like robots with dull mechanical movements. They were ready enough to go on fighting, but some of them hardly knew what they were doing, and the end of the nightmare in which they were living was now becoming more important to them than the idea of victory. It had been so hot through the day that water had begun to seem like the one last luxury in the world, more urgent even than sleep, and when water mules went by men ran forward to lick the moisture off the canvas buckets.

On Chunuk Bair the trenches were barely thirty yards apart, and Kemal got two regiments into his front line very quietly through the night. All depended on whether or not the British guns fired on this mass of closely-packed men before they could charge with the light of the morning sun behind them.

When there were still a few minutes to go before daybreak Kemal crept out into no-man’s-land and softly called out a few last words of encouragement to his men as he crawled along. ‘Don’t hurry. Let me go first. Wait until you see me raise my whip and then all rush forward together.’

At four-thirty he stood up between the opposing trenches. A bullet smashed his wrist watch but he raised his whip and walked towards the British line. Four hours later not an Allied soldier remained on Sari Bair.

It had been a fiercer charge than the one at Suvla, more compact and much more desperate, and most of the Turks who took part in it were obliterated by the British artillery on the open slopes. But they managed to win back their lost trenches, and by midday on August 10 not a single height of any importance at Suvla or Anzac was in British hands. At Cape Helles the battle subsided to a fitful end.