Corps had won and fortified their position. Men writing or reporting on
service about them referred to them as the A.N.Z.A.C., and these letters
soon came to mean the place in which they were, un-named till then,
probably, save by some rough Turkish place-name, but now likely to be
printed on all English maps, with the other names, of Brighton Beach and
Hell Spit, which mark a great passage of arms.
III
King Marsilies parted his army: ten columns he kept by him, and the
other ten rode in to fight. The Franks said: "God, what ruin we shall
have here. What will become of the twelve Peers?" The Archbishop Turpin
answered first: "Good knights, you are the friends of God; to-day you
will be crowned and flowered, resting in the holy flowers of Paradise,
where no coward will ever come."
The Franks answered: "We will not fail. If it be God's will, we will not
murmur. We will fight against our enemies: we are few men, but
well-hardened."
They spurred forward to fight the pagans. The Franks and Saracens are
mingled.
_The Song of Roland._
This early fighting, which lasted from dawn on the 25th April till noon
on the following day, won us a footing, not more than that, on the
Peninsula; it settled the German brag that we should never be able to
land. We had landed upon, had taken, and were holding the whole of the
southwestern extremity of the Peninsula and a strip of the Ægean coast,
in the face of an army never less than twice our strength, strongly
entrenched and well supplied. We had lost very heavily in the attack,
our men were weary from the exceedingly severe service of the landing,
but the morrow began the second passage in the campaign, the advance
from the sea, before the Turks should have recovered.
Many have said to me, with a naïveté that would be touching if it were
not so plainly inspired by our enemies: "Why did not the troops press on
at once, the day they landed? The Japanese pressed on the day they
landed, so did the Americans in Cuba. If you had pressed on at once, you
would have won the whole Peninsula. The Turks were at their last
cartridge, and would have surrendered."
It is quite true that the Japanese moved inland immediately from their
transports at Chemulpho and Chinampo. Those ports were seized before the
Russians knew that war was declared: they were not defended by Russian
soldiers, and the two small Russian cruisers caught there by the
Japanese fleet were put out of action before the transports discharged.
The Japanese were free to land as they chose on beaches prepared, not
with machine guns and mines, but with cranes, gangways and good roads.
Even so, they did not press on. The Japanese do not press on unless they
are attacking: they are as prudent as they are brave: they waited till
they were ready and then marched on. The Americans landed at Daiquiri
and at Guanica unopposed and in neither case engaged the enemy till next
day.
In the preceding chapter I have tried to show why we did not press on at
once, after landing. We did not, because we could not, because two fresh
men strongly entrenched, with machine guns, will stop one tired man with
a rifle in nine cases out of ten. Our men had done the unimaginable in
getting ashore at all, they could not do the impossible on the same day.
I used to say this, to draw the answer, "Well, other troops would have
done it," so that I might say, what I know to be the truth, that no
other men on this earth either would have or could have made good the
landing; and that the men have not yet been born who could have advanced
after such a feat of arms. The efforts of men are limited by their
strength: the strength of men, always easily exhausted, is the only
strength at the disposal of a general, it is the money to be spent by
him in the purchase of victory, whether by hours of marching in the mud,
digging in the field, or in attack. Losses in attack are great, though
occasional, losses from other causes are great and constant. All armies
in the field have to be supplied constantly with fresh drafts to make
good the losses from attack and exhaustion. No armies can move without
these replenishments, just as no individual men can go on working, after
excessive labour, without rest and food. Our losses in the landings were
severe, even for modern war, even for the Dardanelles. The bloodiest
battle of modern times is said to have been Antietam or Sharpsburg, in
the American Civil War, where the losses were perhaps nearly one-third
of the men engaged. At V Beach the Munsters lost more than one-third,
and the Dublins more than three-fifths of their total strength. The
Lancashires at W Beach lost nearly as heavily as the Dublins. At Anzac,
one Australian battalion lost 422 out of 900. At X Beach, the Royals
lost 487 out of 979. All these battalions had lost more than half their
officers, indeed by the 28th April the Dublins had only one officer
left. How could these dwindled battalions press on?
Then for the individual exhaustion. Those engaged in the first landing
were clambering and fighting in great heat, without proper food, and in
many cases without water, for the first 24 or 36 hours, varying the
fighting with hurried but deep digging in marl or clay, getting no
sleep, nor any moment's respite from the peril of death. Then, at the
end of the first phase, when the fact that they had won the landing was
plain, some of these same men, unrested, improperly fed, and wet through
with rain, sweat and the sea, had to hold what they had won, while the
others went down to the beach to make piers, quarry roads, dig shelters,
and wade out to carry or drag on shore food, drink, munitions and heavy
guns, and to do this without appliances, by the strength of their arms.
Then when these things had been done almost to the limit of human
endurance, they carried water, food and ammunition to the trenches, not
in carts but on their backs, and then relieved their fellows in the
trenches and withstood the Turk attacks and replied to the Turks' fire
for hours on end. At Anzac the A.N.Z. Army Corps had "96 hours'
continuous fighting in the trenches with little or no sleep" and "at no
time during the 96 hours did the Turks' firing cease, although it varied
in volume; at times the fusillade was simply deafening." Men worked like
this, to the limit of physical endurance, under every possible exposure
to wet, heat, cold, death, hunger, thirst and want of rest, become
exhausted, and their nerves shattered, not from fear, which was a thing
those men did not understand, but because the machine breaks. On the top
of the misery, exhaustion and nerve-ceasing peril, is "the dreadful
anxiety of not knowing how the battle is progressing," and the still
worse anxiety of vigilance. To the strain of keeping awake, when
dead-beat, is added the strain of watching men, peering for spies,
stalking for snipers and listening for bombing-parties. Under all these
strains the minds of strong men give way. They are the intensest strains
ever put upon intelligences. Men subjected to them for many hours at a
time cannot at once "press on," however brave their hearts may be. Those
who are unjust enough to think that they can, or could, should work for
a summer's day, without food or drink, at digging, then work for a night
in the rain carrying heavy boxes, then dig for some hours longer, and at
the end ask me to fire a machine gun at them while they "press on,"
across barbed wire, in what they presume to be the proper manner.
Our men could not "press on" at once. They had not enough unwounded men
to do more than hold the hordes of fresh Turks continually brought up
against them. They had no guns ashore to prepare an advance, nor enough
rifle ammunition to stand a siege. They had the rations in their packs
and the water in their bottles, and no other supplies but the seven
days' food, water and rifle ammunition put into each boat at the
landing. To get men, stores, water and guns ashore, under fire, on
beaches without wharves, cranes or derricks of any kind, takes time, and
until men and goods were landed no advance was possible. Until then, our
task was not to press on, but to hang on, like grim death. It was for
the enemy to press on, to beat our tired troops before their supports
could be landed, and this the Turks very well understood, as their
captured orders show, and as their behaviour showed only too clearly.
During the days which followed the landing, the Turks, far from being at
their last cartridge, and eager to surrender, prevented our pressing on,
by pressing on themselves, in immense force and with a great artillery,
till our men were dying of fatigue in driving back their attacks.
One point more may be discussed, before resuming the story. The legend,
"that the Turks were at their last cartridge and would have surrendered
had we advanced," is very widely spread abroad by German emissaries. It
appears in many forms, in print, in the lecture and in conversation.
Sometimes place and date are given, sometimes the authority, all
confidently, but always differently. It is well to state here the truth
so that the lie may be known. The Turks were never at the end of their
supplies. They were always better and more certainly supplied with
shells and cartridges than we were. If they were ever (as perhaps they
sometimes were) rather short of big gun ammunition, so were we. If they
were sometimes rather short of rifles and rifle ammunition, so were we.
If they were often short of food and all-precious water, so were we, and
more so, and doubly more so. For all our supplies came over hundreds of
miles of stormy water infested by submarines and were landed on open
beaches under shell fire, and their supplies came along the Asiatic
coast and by ferry across the Hellespont, and thence, in comparative
safety, by road to the trenches. The Turkish army was well supplied,
well equipped, more numerous and in better positions than our own. There
was neither talk nor thought among them at any time of surrender, nor
could there have been, in an army so placed and so valiant. There was
some little disaffection among them. They hated their German officers
and the German methods of discipline so much that many prisoners when
taken expressed pleasure at being taken, spat at the name of German, and
said "English good, German bad." Some of this, however, may have been
Levantine tact.
Late on the 26th April, the French corps landed men at V Beach and took
the trenches on the right of the ground won, i.e., towards the Straits.
At noon the next day the whole force advanced inland without much
opposition, for rather more than a mile. At nightfall on the 27th, they
held a line across the Peninsula from the mouth of the Sighir
watercourse (on the Ægean) to Eski Hissarlik (on the Straits). The men
were very weary from the incessant digging of trenches, fighting, and
dragging up of stores from the beach. They dug themselves in under shell
and rifle fire, stood to their arms to repel Turk attacks for most of
the night, and at eight next morning began the battle of the 28th of
April. The French corps was on the right. The 29th Division (with one
battalion of the R.N. Division), on the left. They advanced across rough
moorland and little cultivated patches to attack the Turk town of
Krithia. All the ground over which they advanced gave cover of the best
kind to the defence. All through the morning, at odd times, the creeping
companies going over that broken country came suddenly under the fire of
machine guns, and lost men before they could fling themselves down. In
the heather and torrent-beds of the Scotch-looking moorland the Turk had
only to wait in cover till his targets appeared, climbing a wall or
getting out of a gulley, then he could turn on his machine guns, at six
hundred shots a minute each, and hold up the advance. From time to time
the Turks attacked in great numbers. Early in the afternoon our advance
reached its furthest point, about three quarters of a mile from Krithia.
Our artillery, short of ammunition at the best of times, and in these
early days short of guns, too, did what it could, though it had only
shrapnel, which is of small service against an entrenched enemy. Those
who were there have said that nothing depressed them more than the
occasional shells from our guns in answer to the continual fire from the
Turk artillery. They felt themselves out-gunned and without support.
Rifle cartridges were running short, for, in spite of desperate efforts,
in that roadless wild land with the beaches jammed with dead, wounded,
stores, the wrecks of boats, and parties trying to build piers under
shell-fire, it was not possible to land or to send up cartridges in the
quantity needed. There were not yet enough mules ashore to take the
cartridge-boxes and men could not be spared; there were too few men to
hold the line. Gradually our men fell back a little from the ground they
had won. The Turks brought up more men, charged us, and drove us back a
little more, and were then themselves held. Our men dug themselves in as
best they could and passed another anxious night, in bitter cold and
driving rain, staving off a Turk attack, which was pressed with resolute
courage against our centre and the French corps to the right of it.
There were very heavy losses on both sides, but the Turks were killed in
companies at every point of attack and failed to drive us further.
The next two days were passed in comparative quiet, in strengthening the
lines, landing men, guns and stores and preparing for the next advance.
This war has shown what an immense reserve of shell is needed to prepare
a modern advance. Our men never had that immense reserve, nor, indeed a
large reserve, and in those early days they had no reserve at all, but a
day to day allowance, and before a reserve was formed the Turks came
down upon us with every man and gun they had, in the desperate night
attack of the 1st of May. This began with shell-fire at ten P.M., and
was followed half-an-hour later by a succession of charges in close
order. The Turk front ranks crept up on hands and knees without firing
(their cartridges had been taken from them) and charged our trenches
with the bayonet. They got into our trenches in the dark, bayoneted the
men in them, broke our line, got through to the second line and were
there mixed up in the night in a welter of killing and firing beyond
description. The moon had not risen when the attack came home. The
fighting took place in the dark: men fired and stabbed in all
directions, at flashes, at shouts, by the burning of the flares, by the
coloured lights of the Turk officers, and by the gleams of the shells on
our right. There were 9,000 Turks in the first line, 12,000 more behind
them. They advanced yelling for God and Enver Pasha, amid the roar of
every gun and rifle in range. They broke through the French, were held,
then driven back, then came again, bore everything before them, and then
met the British supports and went no further. Our supports charged the
Turks and beat them back; at dawn our entire line advanced and beat them
back in a rout, till their machine guns stopped us.
Upon many of the dead Turks in front of the French and English trenches
were copies of an address issued by a German officer, one Von
Zowenstern, calling on the Turks to destroy the enemy, since their only
hope of salvation was to win the battle or die in the attempt. On some
bodies were other orders, for the Mahometan priests to encourage the men
to advance, for officers to shoot those soldiers who hung back, and for
prisoners to be left with the reserves, not taken to the rear. In this
early part of the campaign there were many German officers in the
Turkish army. In these early night attacks they endeavoured to confuse
our men by shouting orders to them in English. One, on the day of the
landing, walked up to one of the trenches of the 29th Division and cried
out, "Surrender, you English, we ten to one." "He was thereupon hit on
the head with a spade by a man who was improving his trench with it."
This battle never ceased for five days. The artillery was never silent.
Our men were shelled, sniped and shrapnelled every day and all day long,
and at night the Turks attacked with the bayonet. By the evening of the
5th May the 29th Division, which had won the end of the Peninsula, had
been reduced by one-half and its officers by two-thirds. The proportion
of officers to men in a British battalion is as one to thirty-seven, but
in the list of killed the proportion was as one to eleven. The officers
of that wonderful company poured out their lives like water; they
brought their weary men forward hour after hour in all that sleepless
ten days, and at the end led them on once more in the great attack of
the 6th-8th of May.
This attack was designed to push the Allied lines further forward into
the Peninsula, so as to win a little more ground, and ease the growing
congestion on the beaches near Cape Helles. The main Turkish position
lay on and about the hump of Achi Baba, and on the high ground
stretching down from it. It was hoped that even if Achi Baba could not
be carried, the ground below him, including the village of Krithia,
might be taken. The movement was to be a general advance, with the
French on the right attacking the high ground nearer to the Straits, the
29th Division on the left, between the French and the sea, attacking the
slowly sloping ground which leads past Krithia up to Achi Baba. Krithia
stands high upon the slope, among orchards and gardens, and makes a good
artillery target, but the slope on which it stands, being much broken,
covered with dense scrub (some of it thorny) and with clumps of trees,
is excellent for defence. The Turks had protected that square mile of
ground with many machine guns and trenches so skilfully concealed that
they could not be seen either from close in front or from aeroplanes.
The French line of attack was over ground equally difficult, but
steeper, and therefore giving more "dead ground," or patches upon which
no direct fire can be turned by the defence. The line of battle from the
French right to the English left stretched right across the Peninsula
with a front (owing to bends and salients) of about five miles. It was
nearly everywhere commanded by the guns of Achi Baba, and in certain
places the enemy batteries on the Turk left, near the Straits, could
enfilade it. Our men were weary but the Turks were expecting strong
reinforcements; the attack could not be delayed.
[Illustration: Exercising mules. A photograph taken late in the
evening. A shell is seen bursting in the background. The highest point
on the horizon is Achi Baba.]
Few people who have not seen modern war can understand what it is like.
They look at a map, which is a small flat surface, and find it difficult
to believe that a body of men could have had difficulty in passing from
one point upon it to another. They think that they themselves would have
found no difficulty, that they would not have been weary nor thirsty,
the distance demanded of them being only a mile, possibly a mile and a
quarter, and the reward a very great one. They think that troops who
failed to pass across that mile must have been in some way wanting, and
that had they been there, either in command or in the attack, the
results would have been different.
One can only answer, that in modern war it is not easy to carry a
well-defended site by direct attack. In modern war, you may not know,
till fire breaks out upon you, where the defence, which you have to
attack, is hidden. You may not know (in darkness, in a strange land)
more than vaguely which is your "front," and you may pass by your enemy,
or over him, or under him without seeing him. You may not see your enemy
at all. You may fight for days and never see an enemy. In modern war
troops see no enemy till he attacks them; then, in most cases if they
are well entrenched with many guns behind them, they can destroy him.
The Allied officers, looking through their field glasses at the ground
to be attacked, could see only rough, sloping ground, much gullied, much
overgrown, with a few clumps of trees, a few walls, orchards and houses,
but no guns, no trenches, no enemy. Aeroplanes scouting over the Turks
could see men but not the trenches nor the guns, they could only report
that they suspected them to be in such a place. Sometimes in the
mornings men would notice that the earth was turned newly on some bare
patch on the hill, but none could be sure that this digging was not a
ruse to draw fire. The trenches were hidden cunningly, often with a
head-cover of planks so strewn with earth and planted with scrub as to
be indistinguishable from the ground about. The big guns were coloured
cunningly, like a bird or snake upon the ground. From above in an
aeroplane an observer could not pick them out so as to be certain, if
they were not in action at the time. Brave men scouting forward at night
to reconnoitre brought back some information, but not more than enough
to show that the Turks were there in force. No man in the Allied Army
expected less than a desperate battle; no officer in the world could
have made it anything but that, with all the odds against us. Nothing
could be done but cover the Turk position with the fire of every gun on
shore or in the ships and then send the men forward, to creep or dash as
far as they could, and then dig themselves in.