Gallipoli

EPILOGUE

THE war never returned to Gallipoli. Soon after the campaign most of the Turkish soldiers were removed to other fronts, and within a few years nearly all the debris of the battlefield had been taken away.[38] In successive winter storms the remnants of the wharves and jetties were destroyed, and the trenches in the hills above fell in upon themselves and lost all pattern. Already by 1918 a thick growth of camel thorn and wild thyme, of saltbush and myrtle, had covered the scarred ground where for nine months there had been nothing but dust or mud.

On January 20, 1918, the Goeben emerged at last. Shortly before dawn she came out of the straits with the Breslau and headed through the Ægean towards Imbros. For two years a British flotilla had been waiting there for just this opportunity, but it chanced that the Lord Nelson and the Agamemnon, the only two ships which were capable of sinking the Goeben, were away at Salonika that day; and so it was left to a group of destroyers and monitors to engage. They had very little chance. The monitor Raglan and another British ship soon went down, and for the Germans it might have been a supremely successful day had they not run on to a minefield off Imbros. The Breslau sank instantly, and the Goeben with a hole in her side struggled back to the Narrows where she beached herself. The vessel was repeatedly attacked from the air during the next few days, but she managed to right herself and escaped to Constantinople. Under the name of Yavus she is still serving with the Turkish Fleet.

Had the war continued into 1919 the British Fleet would have made another attempt to force the Dardanelles. In 1918 Admiral Wemyss had been installed as First Sea Lord, and Keyes was in command of the Dover Patrol. They had obtained the cabinet’s consent to the new assault, and were actually engaged in assembling the ships when they were forestalled by the Armistice. It was signed with the Turks in the harbour of Mudros on October 30, 1918, twelve days before the cessation of hostilities in France. A fortnight later an Allied flotilla steamed up the Dardanelles, a long grey line of silent ships watched silently by the Turkish gunners on the cliffs, and an occupation force was put ashore.

Talaat and Enver did not wait for the end. Shortly before the Armistice they were ousted by a provisional government, and while all the waterfront at Constantinople was hung with Greek flags in expectation of the arrival of the Allied Fleet they fled to Germany. Talaat made his home under another name in Berlin, and from there in 1921 he sent a message to Aubrey Herbert in England suggesting that they should meet. The rendezvous took place at Hamm in Germany, and Talaat proposed an Anglo-Turkish alliance. He agreed that he had made mistakes — that the Young Turks should never have joined the Germans — but that, he said, was past and done with; the important thing was that Britain was losing everything she had gained in Turkey by failing to come to an agreement with Mustafa Kemal.

The two men talked at great length, and it did not seem to Herbert that Talaat, even in these circumstances when his voice could only be a voice in a void, was absurd or even particularly pathetic. He was thinner and he was obviously poor, but the shrewdness remained, the hardness and the subtlety. Herbert said he could do no more than report to the Foreign Office, and Talaat went off in the Berlin train.

Talaat was wrong in one important aspect of his argument, for the past was not nearly done with yet. A few days later he felt a tap on his shoulder as he was walking in the street in Berlin, and turning round he saw the strained white face of a young Armenian student. This boy, Solomon Telririam by name, was in that instant the apotheosis of the ruined Armenian race. As a child he had seen his father stripped and murdered by the Turks, his mother and sisters put on the road for the Mesopotamian desert only to be raped and butchered by their guards. Someone had picked him up unconscious from the ground, and somehow he had made his way through Russia to Berlin. There, he said later, he had a vision: his mother was standing over him saying, ‘You know Talaat is here. But you seem quite heartless and are not my son.’ And now in the street, having looked for a second into the gypsy face, the boy took a revolver from his pocket and blew out Talaat’s brains.

Both Liman, who was now living in retirement in Germany, and Talaat’s widow gave evidence at the trial — Liman to defend the reputation of himself and the German soldiers who were in Turkey at the time of the Armenian massacres, and the widow to plead for her husband’s name. Yet no one had the ghost of a chance of exonerating Talaat on this issue. One of the telegrams sent to a provincial Turkish commander was read in court. The officer had asked for the name of the place to which he was to send the Armenians whom he had rounded up. Talaat replied, ‘The place where they are being sent to is nowhere.’

Enver too had set out for Germany at the collapse in 1918, and soon after he was gone he was condemned to death in Constantinople. He made his way across the Black Sea to Odessa, and thence overland through the chaos of the Balkans to Berlin. He soon grew tired of the wretched life of a refugee in a defeated capital, and in 1919 he returned to Russia to try his fortune with the Soviets. For a while he was with General Denikin in the struggle for the independence of the Caucasus, but when Denikin negotiated with the Allies he went to Azerbaijan. During 1920 and 1921 he was employed at Moscow as the director of the Asiatic department of the Soviet government, and he attended a conference at Baku as the leader of the communist movement in the Middle East. From this point on the story grows obscure; he was constantly reported dead only to appear again. In the end, however, it appears that he turned against the Russians, and he is said to have met his death leading a cavalry charge against them in the mountains of Russian Turkestan in 1922. He was then in his early forties.

Liman remained in command of the Turkish Army on the southern front in Syria until he was defeated by Allenby in 1918, when he handed over the command to Kemal and returned to Constantinople. There he surrendered to the Allies, and was interned in Malta until the summer of 1919. In the ten years that were left to him (he was already sixty at Gallipoli), he enjoyed a dignified and respected retirement, and the private rages which, one feels, lie just below the surface in such a controlled character were his own affair. He died a few years before Hitler came to power and left a name as a military strategist which was hardly less admired in Britain than it was in Germany.

Of Kemal’s own fabulous rise to power there are of course very full accounts, but perhaps his first triumphs at the Dardanelles were as important to him as any others. When towards the end of the campaign he arrived in Constantinople ill and exhausted not even Enver’s opposition could prevent the Turkish newspapers from greeting him as ‘The Saviour of Gallipoli’.

In August 1916 a Royal Commission was set up in London to investigate the Gallipoli campaign. General Monro, who was then on his way to India to become Commander-in-Chief, was the first witness, and in the ensuing year nearly 200 others were called to give evidence: Churchill and Hamilton, de Robeck and Keyes, Stopford and Fisher, all the generals and admirals, and finally the War correspondents, Nevinson, Ashmead-Bartlett and Murdoch. Kitchener, who by then was dead,[39] was the only major figure who did not put his case. At the end of 1917 the Commission’s report came out, and it stated its general conclusions very clearly: ‘… from the outset the risks of failure attending the enterprise outweighed its chances of success.’ General Monro was congratulated upon the evacuation: it was, the Commission said, ‘a wise and courageous decision.’

Dealing with the Suvla landing, the Commissioners expressed the view that General Stopford might have kept in closer touch with his troops, but Hamilton, they thought, had only increased his difficulties by intervening on August 8. ‘We regard the intervention,’ the report stated, ‘as well-intentioned but injudicious.’ In short, the general conclusion was that the campaign was a mistake, and that even with better luck and better management, it could hardly have succeeded.

In 1917 the Dardanelles Commissioners were not ideally placed for taking an historical view of the campaign, for there was then still another year of trench warfare to be fought in France, and the Russian revolution had not yet taken its full effect; and so it may not have been altogether apparent then that there were worse things in the world than the loss of half a dozen old battleships in the Dardanelles, or the weakening of the French front by a few extra divisions which might have made all the difference at Gallipoli.

It was apparent only that the Allies had been incomparably the losers. During the 259 days that elapsed between the first landings in April 1915 and the final withdrawal in January 1916 they sent half a million men to Gallipoli, and slightly more than half of these became casualties. There is some doubt about the exact number of the Turkish losses, but they are officially computed at 251,000, which is just one thousand less than those suffered by the Allies; and this perhaps is the best indication of how closely the struggle was fought.[40]

As for the strategic consequences of the defeat, they scarcely bore thinking about. Twenty Turkish divisions were set free to attack Russia and to threaten Egypt. All contact with Russia and Rumania was lost, and the war dragged on in the Near East for another three years while another Allied army, infinitely greater in size than the one employed at Gallipoli, slowly and painfully made good the ground that had been lost. Before the Ottoman Empire fell in 1918 nearly three-quarters of a million Allied soldiers were sent to Salonika, and another 280,000 fought their way northwards across the desert from Egypt to Jerusalem and Damascus. Except for the Anzac troops none of the men who were evacuated from Gallipoli were ever employed against the Germans as General Monro had hoped they would be; they remained in the East until the end of the war.

The campaign had been a mighty destroyer of reputations. When Kitchener returned to England at the end of 1915 he was forced to reinstate the General Staff in the War Office, and he was no longer a semi-dictatorial figure in the cabinet. He was sixty-five, Gallipoli seemed to have deprived him of his old oracular powers of taking decisions, and Lloyd George, Bonar Law and others began a concerted move to get him out. At his death six months later his influence was rapidly falling away. In the years that followed it was demonstrated over and over again in many books that the sinking of the Hampshire had saved Kitchener from a sad and inevitable decline. Yet he was so revered by the public in England that for a long time people simply could not bring themselves to believe that he was dead, and there was a persistent rumour that he was a prisoner of the Germans.

And still the aura persists, his name still rises above that of any other British general in the first world war, and it is not clear that these others managed any better than he would have done had he lived and remained in office. He delayed and vacillated over Gallipoli, and in the end it was his undoing; yet he understood the campaign with a better strategical sense than most of his contemporaries, and for a time at least — that time when he persuaded the British and the French Governments to give priority to Gallipoli — he had the courage of his imagination.

It was the same with Churchill, except that in his case he lived on and had to fight his way back. It was not until 1917 that Lloyd George, the new Prime Minister, felt that he was able to bring him into the Government again as Minister of Munitions, and even then there was much opposition to it. As late as the general election of 1923 there were cries of ‘What about the Dardanelles?’ whenever he addressed a public meeting. That was the year when the Lloyd George coalition fell, and Churchill was defeated in the election — his first defeat since he had entered the House of Commons nearly a quarter of a century before. His eclipse seemed to be complete. In a study of the Gallipoli campaign an American staff officer wrote, ‘It is doubtful if even Great Britain could survive another world war and another Churchill.’ And the Australian Official History which appeared about this time contained these words: ‘So through a Churchill’s lack of imagination, a layman’s ignorance of artillery, and the fatal power of a young enthusiasm to convince older and slower brains, the tragedy of Gallipoli was born.’ Somewhere in the painful fields of memory the ghost of Fisher was still repeating, ‘Damn the Dardanelles. They will be our grave.’

Then in the nineteen-twenties the reaction began to set in. The first surprise came from the Turkish General Staff when they admitted that on March 19, 1915, nearly all their ammunition at the Narrows had been shot away, and that a renewed attack on that day might very well have been decisive. The whole conception of the naval attack was now seen, if not in a new light, in a more controversial way. Other evidence followed — evidence of the extreme political tension in Constantinople at that time, and of the fact that Turkey possessed only two arsenals which the Allied Fleet might easily have destroyed.

In its report the Turkish staff stated: ‘A naval attack executed with rapidity and vigour at the outbreak of the war might have been successful… if the Entente Fleets had appeared before Constantinople the eight divisions retained there would have been impotent to defend it.’ And so that first and much derided directive: ‘The Admiralty should prepare for a naval expedition in February to bombard and take the Gallipoli peninsula with Constantinople as its objective,’ was not so fanciful after all.

Roger Keyes, not surprisingly, needed very little persuading about the importance of these revelations. In 1925, when he was in command of the Mediterranean Fleet, he steamed through the Dardanelles and, according to Aspinall, who was with him, he could hardly speak for emotion. ‘My God,’ he said at last, ‘it would have been even easier than I thought; we simply couldn’t have failed… and because we didn’t try, another million lives were thrown away and the war went on for another three years.’

Other experts — and they were still in a majority — remained unconvinced. Yet no one could altogether ignore the admission of Liman von Sanders and the Turkish commanders that more than once the divisional generals at Cape Helles had wanted to withdraw behind Achi Baba; that on at least two occasions, at the original landing at Anzac in April and again at Suvla in August, the Allies were on the very edge of breaking through and were only prevented from doing so by the intervention of Mustafa Kemal.

Gradually too with the passing of time the great events of the war and its aftermath were falling into perspective, and the Gallipoli adventure was seen, not in isolation, but as a part of the general strategy; not as a sideshow, but as an alternative to the fearful three years of slaughter that followed in the trenches in France, to the long campaign against the Turks in Mesopotamia, and to the expedition to Salonika. It was even perhaps not too much to say that if the Allies had succeeded in penetrating the Dardanelles in 1915 or 1916 the Russians would not have signed a separate peace, and that the revolution might not have followed, not at all events so soon, or possibly so drastically.

Seen in this new light the Gallipoli campaign was no longer a blunder or a reckless gamble; it was the most imaginative conception of the war, and its potentialities were almost beyond reckoning. It might even have been regarded, as Rupert Brooke had hoped, as a turning point in history. Certainly in its strictly military aspect its influence was enormous. It was the greatest amphibious operation which mankind had known up till then, and it took place in circumstances in which nearly everything was experimental: in the use of submarines and aircraft, in the trial of modern naval guns against artillery on the shore, in the manœuvre of landing armies in small boats on a hostile coast, in the use of radio, of the aerial bomb, the land mine, and many other novel devices. These things led on through Dunkirk and the Mediterranean landings to the invasion of Normandy in the second world war. In 1940 there was very little the Allied commanders could learn from the long struggle against the Kaiser’s armies in the trenches in France. But Gallipoli was a mine of information about the complexities of the modern war of manœuvre, of the combined operation by land and sea and sky; and the correction of the errors made then was the basis of the victory of 1945. The next time, as Kitchener had once hoped, ‘they got it right.’

It was Churchill himself who first restored the reputation of the Gallipoli campaign with the publication in the twenties of The World Crisis, his study of the first world war. He had never really been heard before, and now, step by step, he took the story through the political and military events which led up to the campaign: the controversy with Fisher, the arguments in cabinet, the long struggle to win support for Gallipoli from Joffre and the trench-warfare generals in France, the agonizing delays that hung on Kitchener’s word, the trembling balance of politics in the Balkans, and finally the crises of the battle itself, when just for a few moments, in a vacuum of indecision, all depended upon the inspiration of a single act of faith.

There followed the admirable official history prepared by Brigadier Aspinall, and it amply confirmed all Churchill had written.

Meanwhile the authors who had served in the campaign had been at work. There were Hamilton’s own diaries, Compton Mackenzie’s Gallipoli Memories, Henry Nevinson’s graceful and accomplished account of the operations, a short book from the Poet Laureate, John Masefield, and two novels that were widely read, The Secret Battle by Alan Herbert, and Tell England by Ernest Raymond. By the nineteen-thirties a large library had grown up, British, French, Turkish and German, and although there was general criticism of the tactics no serious student now questioned the wisdom of the Allies going to the Dardanelles.

An astonishing number of the Gallipoli commanders survived to see this vindication. Birdwood lived on until his ninety-seventh year, and Keyes, having served as Director of Combined Operations in the second world war, died in 1945, leaving behind him an endless speculation as to what might have happened had he been the admiral in command in the Dardanelles and de Robeck his chief-of-staff. Nasmith of the E 11 went on to become the youngest admiral afloat. Others took up careers that could never have been predicted: Allanson became the British consul at Monte Carlo, Murdoch, the Australian journalist, became the owner of a powerful chain of newspapers and radio stations, Unwin resigned from the Navy almost at once and became a well-known yachtsman; he had three children. Others again were young and obscure when they fought at Gallipoli, but later the world knew them very well. Among these there were Clement Attlee, then a spruce young captain of thirty-two, and three future field marshals, Slim, Harding and the Australian, Blamey. Of the group of officers who buried Rupert Brooke on Skyros only Freyberg and Arthur Asquith survived. Freyberg fought through the second world war, a V.C. with three bars to his D.S.O., and subsequently Governor-General of New Zealand. De Robeck, Monro and Stopford died at the end of the nineteen-twenties.

Hamilton was not asked to serve in the field again after the campaign, but his later career was in some ways the most remarkable of all. In 1918 he became Lieutenant of the Tower of London, and in 1932 Rector of Edinburgh University. Year after year, while all but a few of his Gallipoli contemporaries reached the ends of their lives, he continued into a distinguished and sensitive old age, the nimbus of Gallipoli always overhanging his name but never daunting him. His Gallipoli Diary, which appeared in 1920, was followed by a prophetic study of the trend of modern war and several books of reminiscence. The second world war passed, and he was still there in his pleasant home at Hyde Park Gardens in London, surrounded by his books, his military trophies and by many friends; a tall thin figure, very well dressed, and it was still a groomed and supple mind. If he was not entirely vindicated at least he was loved and respected. All the great opponents of Gallipoli were gone, Monro and the generals of the western front, Bonar Law, Carson and Northcliffe. When the General died on October 12, 1947, he had reached the great age of ninety-four, and a large congregation of the leading people in Britain gathered at a service in Westminster Abbey to honour his memory.

It was the silence of the Gallipoli peninsula which most surprised and awed the survivors of the campaign who returned there after the war, the stillness of the cliffs and beaches where nothing much remained of the battle except the awful sight of the white bones of unburied soldiers and the rusting guns along the shore. Of the sunken battleships nothing was to be seen; the Majestic was broken up by an Italian company and sold for scrap, and the other vessels, the Triumph, the Irresistible, the Bouvet and the Ocean lay too deep for salvage. The River Clyde was gone. Although she had been shelled a thousand times they towed her off the beach at Sedd-el-Bahr and at Malta engineers soon patched up her broken plates. In 1920 she was sold to a Spanish owner, and in the nineteen-fifties she was still sailing the Mediterranean under the name of Muruja Y Aurora.

The peninsula itself was cordoned off as a military area by the Turks, but the peasants came back and replanted the land about Cape Helles and Maidos and Suvla Bay. At the Narrows the Allied occupation force dismantled the guns, but the two mediæval castle-fortresses still stood. Chanak was rebuilt, was shattered by an earthquake and was rebuilt again; and little by little the other towns on the peninsula were restored to what they were. All the rest of the wild and lonely coast remained unchanged, and the second world war passed over it without making any difference. Today the hills are as deserted as ever, and packs of wolves still appear from time to time. In a cold winter they descend to the valleys to attack the flocks, and they have even been known to bring a donkey down.

Today one needs a guide to find one’s way around the battlefields. At Sedd-el-Bahr one recognizes at once the shattered fortress, the half-moon beach and the ledge of sand under which the first survivors of the River Clyde waited all day on April 25, 1915; but beyond this, on the long slopes to Achi Baba all traces of the fighting have gone. Just occasionally a farmer ploughing deeply will turn up a rusted bullet or a piece of shrapnel, and it is not unknown for a hand-grenade to burst beneath the bullocks’ hooves.

At Anzac, where the land is too broken up for any cultivation to be possible, there is much more evidence of the battle. Here the trenches, growing shallower and shallower every year, can yet be seen; the holes of the old tunnels still vanish into darkness, and one has only to kick the dust to turn up jagged pieces of metal, the remains of a pannikin or a hobnailed boot, perhaps a broken segment of a rum jar with the makers’ name still on it. The scene of the past fighting is evoked very easily: the mule teams winding up from the beach, the city of dugouts perched on the sides of the cliffs, the soldiers bathing in the sea, the heat and the flies and the fearful racket of shellfire re-echoing in every valley. But it is still hardly possible to bring oneself to believe that for nearly nine months men could have lived and fought at such places as Quinn’s Post. One jump brings you from the Turkish trench to the Allied line; it is too close, too savage, too intimate to be entirely credible to an age that only knows the enemy at a distance, and as a disembodied figure in a machine.

The cemeteries at Gallipoli are unlike those of any other battlefield in Europe. As soon as the Armistice was signed an Allied war graves commission arrived, and it was decided that the dead as far as possible should be buried where they fell. Consequently a score or more of cemeteries were made, some with only a hundred graves, others with thousands, and they lie on every height where the fighting reached its zenith. Each is surrounded by a bank of pines, and the graves themselves, which are not marked by crosses but by marble plaques in the ground, are thickly planted with cypresses and junipers, arbutus and rosemary and such flowering shrubs as the Judas tree. In winter moss and grass cover the ground, and in summer a thick carpet of pine needles deadens the footfall. There is no sound except for the wind in the trees and the calls of the migrating birds who have found these places the safest sanctuary on the peninsula. The effect upon the visitor’s mind is not that of tragedy or death but of an immense tranquillity, of the continuity of things.

The highest of these cemeteries lies on Chunuk Bair at the spot where the New Zealanders reached the crest and Allanson and his men looked briefly down upon Maidos and the Narrows. Here perhaps more than anywhere else the Gallipoli campaign is revealed, for as the eye roams round from west to east it falls on the salt lake at Suvla, and then on the cascade of hills and ravines around Anzac Cove, and finally on the high stone pillar which has been erected on Cape Helles just above the beach where the 29th Division came ashore. These scenes are in the immediate foreground, and they are set, as it were, in a frame of other older battlefields in the Ægean Islands, the Troad and the Hellespont.

For nearly forty years the cemeteries have been tended with great devotion by a Major Millington, an old Australian soldier. He has a curious existence, for at Chanak on the Narrows, where he has his house, he is in a Turkish military area and may not move more than a thousand paces in any direction without escort. However, the young Turkish conscripts accompany him willingly enough as he goes over to the peninsula month by month and year by year to supervise his staff of local stonemasons and gardeners. The Turks find this preoccupation with the dead somewhat strange, since their own soldiers who died at Gallipoli were buried in anonymous communal graves, and until recently almost their only memorial was a legend picked out in large white letters on the hillside above Chanak. It reads, ‘March 18, 1915’—a reminder to all passing ships that that was the day when the Allied Fleet was defeated. However, the Turkish gardeners work well; no wall around the French and British cemeteries is allowed to crumble, no weed is anywhere allowed to grow, and now in the nineteen-fifties the gardens are more beautiful than ever. Yet hardly anyone ever visits them. Except for occasional organized tours not more than half a dozen visitors arrive from one year’s end to the other. Often for months at a time nothing of any consequence happens, lizards scuttle about the tombstones in the sunshine and time goes by in an endless dream.