Gallipoli

CHAPTER SIX

THERE was a fever of excitement about the ‘Constantinople Expedition’ among young men in England. ‘It’s too wonderful for belief,’ Rupert Brooke wrote as he was setting out. ‘I had not imagined Fate could be so kind… Will Hero’s Tower crumble under the 15-inch guns? Will the sea be polyphloisbic and wine-dark and unvintageable? Shall I loot mosaics from St. Sophia, and Turkish Delight and carpets? Should we be a Turning Point in History? Oh God! I’ve never been quite so happy in my life I think. Never quite so pervasively happy; like a stream flowing entirely to one end. I suddenly realize that the ambition of my life has been — since I was two — to go on a military expedition against Constantinople.’

Rupert Brooke, with his romanticism, his eagerness and his extreme physical beauty, is the symbolic figure in the Gallipoli campaign. One feels that he was destined to be there, that among all these tens of thousands of young men this was the one who was perfectly fitted to express their exuberance, their secret devotion, their ‘half joy of life and half readiness to die’.[8]

He was just twenty-seven at this time, and the circumstances of his life were almost too good to be true. There had been his lyrical schooldays at Rugby, where he was liked by everybody and where he was in all the teams, and all the literary honours were his. Then Cambridge with the dabblings in socialism, the amateur theatricals, the sittings-up all night, the ramblings through the countryside talking of Oscar Wilde and singing all the way. Like T. E. Lawrence later on he had met and captivated almost everyone who counted in London, from the Asquiths and the Churchills to the Shaws and Henry James. He had travelled everywhere (though always at the end of a thread that tied him to England), and just before the war had been searching for lost Gauguins in Tahiti in the South Pacific. It was Churchill who had obtained for him his commission in the Royal Naval Division which had gone first to Antwerp and was now committed to Gallipoli. More than ever, on the eve of this new adventure, the poet was the hero of Mrs. Cornford’s poem:

Brooke’s own war sonnets were soon to be on everybody’s lips:

All this — the charmed life, the beauty, the immense promise of his talents — was now to be risked in battle in the classical Ægean. It was indeed almost too wonderful for belief.

As always, Brooke was surrounded by his friends. There was young Arthur Asquith, the Prime Minister’s son; Aubrey Herbert, the orientalist who ‘went to the East by accident as a young man may go to a party, and find his fate there’; others like Charles Lister and Denis Browne who would certainly have been something in the world had they not been about to die. To these, new friends were constantly being added; men like Bernard Freyberg, who was in California when war broke out and came back to England to enlist. He joined the Naval Division.

Soon they were all together in Egypt, living in tents, driving out to the desert to see the pyramids by moonlight, a dedicated group ringed about with its own code and its excitement in the adventure that lay ahead; and they were completely happy. Then Rupert Brooke went down with sunstroke, and the Commander-in-Chief (whom of course he had known in England) called on him in his tent. When Hamilton offered him a place on the headquarters staff Brooke refused; he wanted to be at the landing on Gallipoli with his men.

‘He looked extraordinarily handsome,’ Hamilton wrote in his diary, ‘quite a knightly presence stretched out there on the sand with the only world that counts at his feet.’

Compton Mackenzie in his Gallipoli Memories relates how he too was caught up in the Gallipoli fever. He was living at Capri at the time, had just published Sinister Street (which had made his name), and was working on the concluding chapters of Guy and Pauline. Directly he heard of the expedition he was in a frenzy of impatience to get to Egypt. Friends in Whitehall found him a job on Hamilton’s staff, and presently he was off down the Mediterranean on the first available boat out of Naples, appalled that as yet he had no uniform, and beset with anxiety that he would not arrive in time.

Almost all these young men — and thousands of others less imaginative but just as ardent — were facing the prospect of battle for the first time, and their letters and diaries reveal how strongly the sense of adventure communicated itself through the Army. For the moment the constricting fear of the unknown was overlaid by the newness and the excitement of the occasion, the feeling that they were isolated together here in this remote place and entirely dependent upon one another. They were determined to be brave. They were convinced that they were committed to something which was larger and grander than life itself, perhaps even a kind of purification, a release from the pettiness of things.

‘Once in a generation,’ Hamilton wrote in his diary, ‘a mysterious wish for war passes through the people. Their instinct tells them that there is no other way of progress and of escape from habits that no longer fit them. Whole generations of statesmen will fumble over reforms for a lifetime which are put into full-blooded execution within a week of a declaration of war. There is no other way. Only by intense sufferings can the nations grow, just as a snake once a year must with anguish slough off the once beautiful coat which has now become a strait jacket.’

In the long tradition of British poet-generals Hamilton remains an exception of an extremely elusive kind. One knows everything and nothing about him. Whether one is dealing with the poet or the general at any given point it is almost impossible to tell. Somewhere about this time — April 1915—there was a remarkable photograph taken of the General on board the Triad, and this perhaps reveals him more intimately than all the diaries and the opinions of his friends. One recognizes the other figures in the group at once. Admiral de Robeck stands with his feet firmly planted on the deck, his arms clasped behind his back, and his steady, carved, admiral’s face belongs to gales at sea. Keyes at his side, is exactly as he ought to be: a slim, angular figure, alas not a beautiful face with those big ears, but most engaging. Braithwaite, the Chief of Staff, is the handsome professional; he fills his uniform like a soldier and he knows where he is. But it is upon Hamilton that one inevitably fixes one’s eye. Everything about him is wrong. He has adopted an almost mincing attitude, his shoulders half-turned in embarrassment towards the camera, one hand resting on a stanchion in a curiously feminine way and the other grasping what appears to be a scarf or a piece of material at his side. The fingers are long, shapely and intensely sensitive, the face quite firm and patrician but somehow nervous and ill-at-ease. His uniform does not fit him — or rather he gives the impression that he ought not to be in uniform at all. His cap is a disaster. Braithwaite has the right kind of cap and it suits him; Hamilton’s perches like a pancake on his head, his tunic is bus-conductorish, his breeches too tight for his wilting bow legs. Physically he is the last possible man one can imagine as a commander-in-chief. He simply does not inspire confidence.

And yet it is clear beyond any doubt from this photograph that here is an exceptionally intelligent man — much more intelligent than any of the others. One looks again and finds oneself hoping that this intelligence, this sensitivity and bird-like quickness, also contains a germ of resolution, perhaps some special sort of refined courage which we had missed before; and still one remains uncertain.

It is left to his record to reassure us. The General was sixty-two when this picture was taken. He was born in the Mediterranean on the island of Corfu, and had spent the whole of his adult life in the Army — indeed, he had seen more active service than almost any other senior general. He had fought the tribesmen on the north-west frontier of India, had served throughout the Boer War, and had been with the Japanese in Manchuria in the Russo-Japanese war. In recent years he had held the appointments of commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean and Inspector-General of Overseas Forces. According to his contemporaries, Hamilton was one of those unusual men who apparently are quite indifferent to danger. His left hand had been shattered early in his career, and more than once he had been recommended for the Victoria Cross.

There was one other thing that set him apart, and that was his exceptional talent as a writer. He read and wrote much poetry and he loved to keep diaries in a kind of French shorthand which he had invented himself; these jottings, he said, cleared his mind and put events into perspective when he was in command in the field. As a staff officer he had been full of ideas. His Staff Officer’s Scrapbook, for example, had foretold the disappearance of cavalry in favour of trench warfare.

There is a theme running through this life, and that is Lord Kitchener. Kitchener was Hamilton’s star. Fifteen years before Hamilton had served as the Field Marshal’s chief-of-staff in South Africa, and the intimacy that had grown up between them was a good deal more than the relationship of the admiring junior to his chief; there was a strength in Kitchener, a massiveness, which appears to have deeply satisfied something which was wanting in Hamilton’s own life. He was quite shrewd enough to see Kitchener’s weaknesses, and in his diaries he occasionally permitted himself to fret about them as a woman will fret about her husband. But Kitchener had only to speak out and Hamilton dissolved at once. Old K. In the end he was bigger than them all. One had to protect him from the fools and the critics. Never for an instant does Hamilton challenge his chief’s authority. Never does he fail to pause before taking a major decision and ask himself, ‘What would K. have done?’ And Kitchener on his side promotes his follower, occasionally favours him with his confidence, and now sends him off to Constantinople.

Henry Nevinson, the war correspondent, has an interesting note on Hamilton’s character: ‘From a mingled Highland and Scottish descent he had inherited the so-called Celtic qualities which are regarded by thorough Englishmen with varying admiration and dislike. His blood gave him so conspicuous a physical courage that after the battles of Caesar’s Camp and Diamond Hill the present writer, who knew him there, regarded him as an example of the rare type which not merely conceals fear with success, but does not feel it. Undoubtedly he was deeply tinged with the “Celtic charm”—that glamour of mind and courtesy of behaviour which create suspicion among people endowed with neither.’

After the war Hamilton was criticized for being so much under Kitchener’s thumb, for being a weak commander, a commentator on battles instead of a man of action. But it is only fair to remember that he was respected and liked by Winston Churchill and a great many other demanding people in London. At Gallipoli none of his senior contemporaries speak against him — not Keyes nor any of the Admirals, not any of the French. The one man who attacks him is a corps commander whom Hamilton dismissed. Under Hamilton’s command there is never any dispute between the Army and the Navy, and all the Allied contingents serve with him the utmost loyalty.

This in itself was something of an achievement, for the force that was now assembling itself in Egypt was a very mixed bag indeed. There were the French, a splendid sight on the parade ground, their officers in black and gold, the men in blue breeches and red coats. There were Zouaves and Foreign Legionaries from Africa, Sikhs and Gurkhas from India, and the labour battalions of Levantine Jews and Greeks. There were the sailors of the British and French Navies. There were the Scottish, English and Irish troops. And finally there were the New Zealanders and the Australians.

These last were an unknown quantity. They were all volunteers, they were paid more money than any of the other soldiers, and they exhibited a spirit which was quite unlike anything which had been seen on a European battlefield before. A strange change had overtaken this transplanted British blood. Barely a hundred years before their ancestors had gone out to the other side of the world from the depressed areas of the United Kingdom, many of them dark, small, hungry men. Their sons who had now returned to fight in their country’s first foreign war had grown six inches in height, their faces were thin and leathery, their limbs immensely lithe and strong. Their voices too had developed a harsh cockney accent of their own, and their command of the more elementary oaths and blasphemies, even judged by the most liberal army standards, was appalling. Such military forms as the salute did not come very easily to these men, especially in the presence of British officers, whom they regarded as effete, and their own officers at times appeared to have very little control over them. Each evening in thousands the Australians and New Zealanders came riding into Cairo from their camp near the pyramids for a few hours’ spree in the less respectable streets, riding on the tops of trams, urging their hired cabs and donkeys along the road — and the city shuddered a little.

This independent spirit was a promising thing in its own way, but for Birdwood, the British officer who was put in command of the Anzac[9] corps, there was a problem here which could not be easily solved. The men were nearly all civilians, and who could say how they would behave when they came under enemy fire for the first time? A period of intensive training began, but there was not much time.

Indeed, there was very little time for any of the matters which Hamilton had to attend to if he was to honour his undertaking that the attack would be launched by the middle of April. He did not reach Alexandria until the afternoon of March 26, and this meant he had barely three weeks in hand. The job that lay before the General was, in effect, nothing less than the setting up of the largest amphibious operation in the whole history of warfare. No similar exploit in the past bore any real comparison: in 1588 the Spanish Armada never did succeed in landing its men on England; neither Napoleon in Egypt in 1799 nor the British and the French in the Crimea in 1854 had had to face such entrenched positions as Liman von Sanders was now establishing at Gallipoli. In fact the only operation that could be compared with this lay thirty years ahead on the beaches of Normandy in the second world war; and the planning of the Normandy landing was to take not three weeks but nearly two years.

Hamilton’s mind went back to classical times. ‘The landing of an army upon the theatre of operations I have described,’ he wrote in one of his despatches, ‘—a theatre strongly garrisoned throughout and prepared for any such attempt — involved difficulties for which no precedent was forthcoming in military history, except possibly in the sinister legends of Xerxes.’

There were some 75,000 men at the General’s disposal: 30,000 Australians and New Zealanders divided into two divisions, the 29th British Division of 17,000 men, one French division of 16,000, and the Royal Naval Division of 10,000. All these forces, together with 1,600 horses, donkeys and mules and 300 vehicles, had to be so assembled on board the ships that they would be able to land together on the enemy coast under the direct fire of the Turkish guns.

It is a matter of some surprise that the expedition ever got to sea at all. On March 26 Hamilton’s administrative staff had still not arrived from England (it did not get to Alexandria until April 11), many of the soldiers were still at sea, no accurate maps existed, there was no reliable information about the enemy, no plan had been made, and no one had yet decided where the Army was to be put ashore.

The simplest of questions were unanswered. Was there water on the shore or not? What roads existed? What casualties were to be expected and how were the wounded men to be got off to the hospital ships? Were they to fight in trenches or in the open, and what sort of weapons were required? What was the depth of water off the beaches and what sort of boats were needed to get the men, the guns and the stores ashore? Would the Turks resist or would they break as they had done at Sarikamish; and if so how were the Allies to pursue them without transport or supplies?

It was perhaps the very confusion of this situation which made it possible for the staff to get things done. Since no one could really calculate what the difficulties were going to be it was simply a matter of taking the material that came to hand, and of hoping for the best. A period of hectic improvisation began. Men were sent into the bazaars of Alexandria and Cairo to buy skins, oildrums, kerosene tins — anything that would hold water. Others bought tugs and lighters on the docks; others again rounded up donkeys and their native drivers and put them into the Army. There were no periscopes (for trench fighting), no hand grenades and trench-mortars; ordinance workshops set to work to design and make them. In the absence of maps staff officers scoured the shops for guide-books.

On the Alexandria docks lamps were set up so that the work of unloading and repacking the ships could go on all night, and soon the harbour was filled with vessels of every kind from Thames tugboats to requisitioned liners. There was a shortage of almost everything — of guns, of ammunition, of aircraft and of men — and Hamilton sent off a series of messages to Kitchener asking for reinforcements. He had found a brigade of Gurkhas in the Egyptian garrison — could he have those? Where were his reserves of artillery and shells? These requests were met either with terse refusals or no reply at all. Hamilton felt that he was hardly in a position to press the point; Kitchener had been known to be ruthless with subordinates who nagged him, and once he had even taken troops away from an officer who had asked for reinforcements. Then too Hamilton remembered that he had promised Kitchener before he left that he would not embarrass him with requests of this kind. Churchill of course would have helped, but the General had deliberately cut himself off from the First Lord. De Robeck also was chary about asking for too much since his messages were bound to go directly to Fisher in the Admiralty.

‘Even more than in the Fleet,’ Hamilton wrote, ‘I find in the Air Service the profound conviction that, if they could only get into direct touch with Winston Churchill, all would be well. Their faith in the First Lord is, in every sense, touching. But they can’t get the contact and they are thoroughly imbued with the idea that the Sea Lords are at the best half-hearted; at the worst, actively antagonistic to us and the whole of our enterprise.’

Hamilton’s own divisional commanders were very far from being enthusiastic. Before drawing up his plans for the invasion the General asked them for their views, and he received a most discouraging series of replies. Hunter-Weston, the commander of the 29th Division, thought that the difficulties were so great that the expedition ought to be abandoned altogether. Paris, the commander of the Naval Division, wrote, ‘To land would be difficult enough if surprise were possible but hazardous in the extreme under present conditions.’ Birdwood changed his ground; he no longer wanted to go ashore at the tip of the peninsula but at Bulair or somewhere in the neighbourhood of Troy. The French too were all for Asia. Even the Egyptian sultan at a ceremonial luncheon at the Abdin Palace in Cairo offered his opinion. The Turkish forts at the Dardanelles, he assured Hamilton, were absolutely impregnable.

There were other worries which were no less serious. The security position was almost entirely out of hand. Greek trading caiques were noting every preparation in the islands and carrying the news back to enemy agents in Athens. Letters were arriving in Alexandria by the ordinary post from England marked, ‘Constantinople Force, Egypt’. And the Egyptian Gazette in Cairo not only announced the arrival of each new contingent but openly discussed the chances of the expedition at the Dardanelles. Hamilton protested in vain; he was told that since Egypt was a neutral country the British authorities could not interfere with the newspapers. The best therefore that could be hoped was that the Turks would regard all this publicity as an elaborate bluff, and Intelligence was instructed to spread a rumour through the Near East that the actual landing would be made at Smyrna.

All this was very depressing. But Kitchener had said that the attempt must be made, and so there could be no question of turning back. In the first week of April, therefore, Hamilton and his staff set about drawing up their plans at their headquarters in the Metropole Hotel in Alexandria. Even if they had faltered — and Hamilton seems to have been at his best during these days, patient, optimistic and extremely energetic — there now began to grow up around him an atmosphere that made it all the more imperative for him to go on. The expedition began to develop a life of its own. However gloomy the commanders might be, a communal will for action had spread itself through the Army. The men were eager to be off, and it was becoming perfectly clear that they would go into the first assault with great determination. The very sight of the ships gathering in Alexandria harbour, the hammerings in the workshops, the long lines of marching men in the desert, the heavy booming of the artillery at practice — all these things seemed to make it inevitable that they must go forward, and that once they attacked they were bound to win. This auto-suggestion, this mass-will towards adventure, presently began to take effect upon the generals. As the date of the assault grew nearer their earlier misgivings were swallowed up in the practical and stimulating work of getting the Army ready to fight. D’Amade, the French commander, drops his ideas on Asia. Birdwood is now sure that he can get his Australians and New Zealanders ashore. Paris sees chances he overlooked before. And Hunter-Weston, having studied the maps and the forces, declares that his earlier appreciation was wrong — the thing is very possible and he particularly likes the role that he himself is to play.

By April 8 Hamilton judged that the arrangements were moving forward at a sufficient pace to enable him to get away and place his plan before de Robeck and the Admirals. The Arcadian, a liner which normally made pleasure cruises to the Norwegian fjords, had been fitted up as a headquarters ship, and in her he sailed for Lemnos. He arrived in Mudros Harbour on April 10, and at once proceeded to his vital conference with the admirals aboard the Queen Elizabeth.

Hamilton’s plan, though complicated in its details, amounted to a simple assault upon the Gallipoli peninsula itself. The main striking force was to be his best division, the British 29th, under Hunter-Weston. It was to go ashore on five small beaches at Cape Helles at the extreme tip of the peninsula, and it was hoped that by the end of the first day the crest of Achi Baba, six miles inland, would be in its hands. Meanwhile Birdwood was to land with the Anzac Force about thirteen miles up the coast between Gaba Tepe and Fisherman’s Hut. Striking across the peninsula through the Sari Bair hills he was to make for Mal Tepe — the mountain on which Xerxes is supposed to have sat while he reviewed his fleet in the Hellespont. Thus the Turks fighting Hunter-Weston at Cape Helles would be cut off in their rear, and the hills dominating the Narrows would be overcome.

Simultaneously, two main diversions were to be carried out. The Royal Naval Division was to make a pretence at landing at the neck at Bulair, and the French were to go ashore for a large armed raid on Kum Kale on the Asiatic side of the Straits. Later these two forces would be brought back to Cape Helles and put into the main attack. By the second or the third day it was hoped that the lower half of the peninsula would be so overrun that the Fleet with its minesweepers could safely pass through the Narrows into the Sea of Marmara.

De Robeck, Wemyss and Keyes were delighted with this plan. They agreed with Hamilton that he was right in rejecting Bulair. It was much too dangerous, despite all its attractions. Directly the Army advanced inland it would lose the support of the naval guns and expose itself to attack on both its flanks — one Turkish army coming down from Thrace and another coming up from Gallipoli. There was also the possibility that Bulgaria might declare war and threaten Hamilton in his rear. The same kind of difficulties would apply if the Allies made their main assault in Asia.

On the peninsula itself no beach was large enough to allow the Army to concentrate for one hammer blow, but the Fleet would be there to cover the assault at every point, and in any case there was a certain virtue in dispersal: Liman von Sanders would get reports of landings from half a dozen different places at once, and for the first twenty-four hours at least he would not know which was the main one. Therefore he would hold back his reserves until the Allies were securely ashore.

There was to be one important refinement of the plan, and this was a stratagem put forward by a Commander Unwin, who seems to have been inspired by the story of the wooden horse at the siege of Troy. He proposed to secrete 2,000 men in an innocent looking collier, the River Clyde, and run her aground at Cape Helles. Directly she touched, a steam hopper and two lighters were to be brought round to her bows and lashed together to form a bridge to the shore. The men would then issue from two sallyports which were to be cut in the ship’s sides. Running along two gangplanks to a platform at the ship’s bows, they would drop on to the bridge and make their way to the beach. It was hoped in this way to empty the ship within a few minutes. In addition, machine guns were to be mounted behind sandbags in the bows, and these were to hold the enemy down while the disembarkation was taking place.

The Navy indeed had been extremely busy with a number of such devices and improvisations. Quite apart from Keyes’ new fleet of destroyer-minesweepers which was now ready, three dummy battleships had arrived. These were ordinary merchantmen enlarged and disguised with wooden guns and superstructure. From a distance the silhouette they presented was exactly that of a battleship, and it was hoped that their presence here in the Ægean might induce the German Fleet to come out and fight in the North Sea.[10]

Air Commodore Samson was now established on Tenedos, and the seaplane carrier Ark Royal had joined the Fleet. Samson’s difficulties had been almost crippling. When his thirty aircraft were uncrated only five were found to be serviceable, and their equipment was not such as to inspire confidence. Bombs were either released from a primitive rack under the pilot’s feet or simply flung overboard by the observer once the safety tabs had been removed. No machine-guns had been fitted at this stage, but instead, there was available a supply of iron spikes; these the pilot or the observer could aim at such of the enemy who appeared below, rather in the manner of a hunter spearing a bear. Although these spikes emitted an unpleasant whirring noise as they descended, and no doubt created a feeling of extreme insecurity among the infantry below, they seldom hit anything. For the rest, Samson’s pilots carried a revolver, binoculars and a lifebelt or an empty petrol can to hold on to in case they fell into the sea. The observers were equipped with a rifle, charts and a watch.

On Tenedos an airfield 800 yards long had been constructed with the aid of Greek workmen who uprooted a vineyard and with oil drums filled with cement rolled the ground moderately flat. But it was not altogether a satisfactory base. From the island the Gallipoli peninsula could be clearly seen, but Cape Helles was seventeen and a half miles away, and Gaba Tepe, where the Australians and New Zealanders were to land, thirty-one miles, and these were formidable distances for an aircraft in those days. Constantinople, of course was out of the question.

Despite these hazards Samson, doing a great deal of flying himself, was already beginning to produce useful results. Carrying volunteer naval officers as observers — usually light-weight midshipmen — he got his new radio-telephone into use, and the spotting for the Fleet’s guns greatly improved. Since the radiotelephone was a one-way system the warships checked back the messages they received with a searchlight. Several bombardments had been carried out in this way, notably the raid on Maidos on April 23.

Much the most important part of Samson’s work, however, in these last days before the attack was his photography of the enemy entrenchments. Hamilton and Keyes together made a close study of these photographs, and were not reassured. At all but one or two places where the landings were to be made there were abundant signs of barbed-wire. This wire was becoming a nightmare in all their minds, and Hamilton privately confided to Samson that he feared that the casualties might be as high as fifty per cent in the first landing. Had they been able to get hold of some of the Navy’s new armoured invasion boats it might have been a different story — but these were a closely guarded secret in the Admiralty at the time, and not even Kitchener was supposed to know anything about them.

When Hamilton had left the Dardanelles in March it had been understood that the Navy would keep harassing the Turks with a series of bombardments along the coast; but now it was found that all such operations were impossible. The entire energies of the Fleet were consumed in the arrangements for the landing. It was decided that the bulk of the invasion force should assemble in Mudros Harbour in the island of Lemnos, with subsidiary bases on Imbros, Tenedos and Skyros. Forty-eight hours before the landing the Fleet with the Army on board would start to move towards its battle stations off the Gallipoli peninsula. A mile or two from the coast the soldiers would be transferred to lighters and small boats and these, in groups of four, would be towed by launches to the shore. The actual landing would take place in the first light of dawn, the assaulting troops carrying with them nothing more than 200 rounds of ammunition, their rifles and trenching tools and three days’ rations.

All this required elaborate preparation: the construction of tows and wharves and barges; the training of midshipmen in piloting launches to fixed points on the strange coast in darkness; the study of the currents and the weather; the arrangements for getting animals on shore and the piping of fresh water from the ships to the beaches; the fixing of signals and codes; the allotting of targets to the battleships and cruisers which would support the landing; the working-out of the whole vast time-table for the movements of the Fleet. Every problem was new or at any rate unusual; there was even a plan for evacuating the Army in case the assault miscarried either in part or altogether.

Meanwhile Hamilton’s 75,000 men had to be transported from Egypt to the islands, a distance of some 700 miles.

Astonishingly — even miraculously — these arrangements and many others went forward without any major setback. Just once the crew of a transport on its way to Lemnos was forced to abandon ship when a Turkish destroyer appeared, but the enemy torpedoes went clean under the vessel’s keel and soon the men were scrambling back on board. Chased by British destroyers the Turkish ship ran for the shore, and beached herself off Chios. Even the weather seemed to prove that Hamilton had been wise to delay, for there were hardly two fine days together in the first fortnight in April. Provisionally the day for the assault was fixed on April 23, which was St. George’s Day; the moon then was due to set two hours before dawn, and thus the armada would be able to approach the coast in the darkness. But on April 21 half a gale set in, and the attack was postponed, at first twenty-four and then forty-eight hours. Finally Sunday, April 25, was chosen as the day.

The island of Lemnos, which had been loaned to the Allies by the Venizelist government in Greece, is reputed to be the abode of Vulcan, and the Argonauts are said to have rested there for a time. By the standards of the Ægean Sea it is not, however, a beautiful place. Few trees can be made to grow, and the local inhabitants have never been able to scratch much more than a bare living from the harsh volcanic rock and the surrounding sea. An uneventful timeless life goes by.

This island now became, in April 1915, the scene of one of the great maritime spectacles of the war. Ship after ship steamed into Mudros Harbour until there were some two hundred of them anchored there, and they made a city on the water. In addition to the warships, every possible variety of vessel had been pressed into service to transport the troops: brightly-painted Greek caiques and pleasure steamers, trawlers and ferryboats, colliers and transatlantic liners. Among the long lines of great battleships and cruisers some vessels, like the Russian cruiser Askold, became great objects of wonder. The Askold carried five extremely tall perpendicular funnels, and the soldiers at once renamed her the Packet of Woodbines. Then there was the ancient French battleship Henri IV, which had scarcely a foot of freeboard and a superstructure so towered and turreted that she looked like a medieval castle, a Braque drawing in heavy grey. These antiquities found themselves lying side by side with the latest submarines and destroyers.

A detached observer might have found the scene almost gay and regatta-like. From shore to ship and from ship to ship swarms of motor-boats and cutters ran about. Every vessel flew its flag, the smoke from hundreds of funnels rose up into the sky, and from one direction or another the sound of bugles and military bands was constantly floating across the water. There was movement everywhere. On the crowded ships the men who were to make the first assault were exercised in getting down rope ladders into boats. Others drilled on deck. Others again exercised the animals on shore. By night thousands of lights and signal lamps sparkled across the bay.

In the midst of this scene, dominating it and imparting an air of great strength and resolution, rode the flagship, the Queen Elizabeth, in which Hamilton had decided to make his headquarters with de Robeck until he was able to set up on shore on the Gallipoli peninsula.

An immense enthusiasm pulsated through the Fleet. With the sight of so many ships around them it seemed to all but a few sceptics more certain than ever that they could not fail. Everyone was delighted when the men scrawled slogans across the sides of their transports: ‘Turkish Delight’; ‘To Constantinople and the Harems’. They lined the decks shouting and cat-calling to one another, cheering each ship that arrived or departed from the harbour. Finally the excitement of the adventure had seized upon everybody’s mind, and the inward choking feeling of dread was overlaid by an outward gaiety, by the exaltation and otherworldness that chloroforms the soldier in the last moments of waiting.

The morning of April 23 broke fine and dear, and de Robeck gave orders for the operations to begin. All that day and on the day following the slower transports amid cheers moved out of Mudros and steamed towards their rendezvous off the beaches. By the evening of Saturday, April 24, the 200 ships were in motion, those carrying the Royal Naval Division headed for the Gulf of Saros, the Anzac contingent making for Imbros, the British and the French for Tenedos. The sea was again unsettled, and a sharp wind blew. As dusk fell a wet three-quarter moon with a halo round it was seen in the sky, but presently this halo cleared away, bright moonlight flooded the night, and the waves began to subside to perfect calm.

Hamilton, going aboard the Queen Elizabeth, found a signal waiting for him. Rupert Brooke was dead. His sunstroke had developed into blood poisoning, and he had died on a French hospital ship at the island of Skyros, just a few hours before he was due to set off for Gallipoli. Freyberg, Browne, Lister and others of his friends had carried him up to an olive grove on the heights of the island, and had buried him there with a rough pile of marble on the grave.

Towards midnight the warships with the assault troops on board were beginning to reach their battle stations. When they were still out of sight of land the ships came to a dead stop, all hands were roused, and a meal of hot coffee and rolls was given to the soldiers. In silence then, with their rifles in their hands and their packs on their backs, the men fell in on numbered squares on deck. There seems to have been no confusion as each platoon went down the ladders hand over hand, and directly the boats were filled they were towed by pinnaces in groups to the stern. The moon had now set, and there remained only a faint starlight in the sky. The battleships, each with four lines of boats behind it, steamed slowly forward again towards the shore. Soon after 4 a.m. the outline of the coast became visible through the early morning mist. An utter stillness enveloped the cliffs; there was no sign of life or movement anywhere.