rough broken sloping ground known to him, ground for the most part
gorse-thyme-and-scrub-covered, being poor soil, but in some places
beautiful with flowers (especially "a spiked yellow flower with a
whitish leaf") and on others green from cultivation. Let him say to
himself that he and an army of his friends are about to advance up the
slope towards the top, and that as they will be advancing in a line,
along the whole length of the three miles, he will only see the advance
of those comparatively near to him, since folds or dips in the ground
will hide the others. Let him, before he advances, look earnestly along
the line of the hill, as it shows up clear, in blazing sunlight only a
mile from him, to see his tactical objective, one little clump of pines,
three hundred yards away, across what seem to be fields. Let him see in
the whole length of the hill no single human being, nothing but scrub,
earth, a few scattered buildings, of the Levantine type (dirty white
with roofs of dirty red) and some patches of dark Scotch pine, growing
as the pine loves, on bleak crests. Let him imagine himself to be more
weary than he has ever been in his life before, and dirtier than he has
ever believed it possible to be, and parched with thirst, nervous,
wild-eyed and rather lousy. Let him think that he has not slept for more
than a few minutes together for eleven days and nights, and that in all
his waking hours he has been fighting for his life, often hand to hand
in the dark with a fierce enemy, and that after each fight he has had to
dig himself a hole in the ground, often with his hands, and then walk
three or four roadless miles to bring up heavy boxes under fire. Let him
think, too, that in all those eleven days he has never for an instant
been out of the thunder of cannon, that waking or sleeping their
devastating crash has been blasting the air across within a mile or two,
and this from an artillery so terrible that each discharge beats as it
were a wedge of shock between the skull-bone and the brain. Let him
think too that never, for an instant, in all that time, has he been free
or even partly free from the peril of death in its most sudden and
savage forms, and that hourly in all that time he has seen his friends
blown to pieces at his side, or dismembered, or drowned, or driven mad,
or stabbed, or sniped by some unseen stalker, or bombed in the dark sap
with a handful of dynamite in a beef-tin, till their blood is caked upon
his clothes and thick upon his face, and that he knows, as he stares at
the hill, that in a few moments, more of that dwindling band, already
too few, God knows how many too few, for the task to be done, will be
gone the same way, and that he himself may reckon that he has done with
life, tasted and spoken and loved his last, and that in a few minutes
more may be blasted dead, or lying bleeding in the scrub, with perhaps
his face gone and a leg and an arm broken, unable to move but still
alive, unable to drive away the flies or screen the ever-dropping rain,
in a place where none will find him, or be able to help him, a place
where he will die and rot and shrivel, till nothing is left of him but a
few rags and a few remnants and a little identification-disc flapping on
his bones in the wind. Then let him hear the intermittent crash and
rattle of the fire augment suddenly and awfully in a roaring, blasting
roll, unspeakable and unthinkable, while the air above, that has long
been whining and whistling, becomes filled with the scream of shells
passing like great cats of death in the air; let him see the slope of
the hill vanish in a few moments into the white, yellow and black smokes
of great explosions shot with fire, and watch the lines of white puffs
marking the hill in streaks where the shrapnel searches a suspected
trench; and then, in the height of the tumult, when his brain is shaking
in his head, let him pull himself together with his friends, and clamber
up out of the trench, to go forward against an invisible enemy, safe in
some unseen trench expecting him.
The Twenty-ninth Division went forward under these conditions on the 6th
of May. They dashed on, or crawled, for a few yards at a time, then
dropped for a few instants before squirming on again. In such an advance
men do not see the battlefield. They see the world as the rabbit sees
it, crouching on the ground, just their own little patch. On broken
ground like that, full of dips and rises, men may be able to see nothing
but perhaps the ridge of a bank ten feet ahead, with the dust flying in
spouts all along it, as bullets hit it, some thousand a minute, and
looking back or to their flanks they may see no one but perhaps a few
men of their own platoon lying tense but expectant, ready for the sign
to advance while the bullets pipe over them in a never-ending birdlike
croon. They may be shut off by some all-important foot of ground from
seeing how they are fronting, from all knowledge of what the next
platoon is doing or suffering. It may be quite certain death to peep
over that foot of ground in order to find out, and while they wait for a
few instants shells may burst in their midst and destroy a half of them.
Then the rest, nerving themselves, rush up the ridge, and fall in a line
dead under machine-gun fire. The supports come up, creeping over their
corpses, get past the ridge, into scrub which some shell has set on
fire. Men fall wounded in the fire, and the cartridges in their
bandoliers explode and slowly kill them. The survivors crawl through the
scrub, half-choked, and come out on a field full of flowers tangled
three feet high with strong barbed wire. They wait for a while, to try
to make out where the enemy is. They may see nothing but the slope of
the field running up to a sky line, and a flash of distant sea on a
flank, but no sign of any enemy, only the crash of guns and the pipe and
croon and spurt of bullets. Gathering themselves together their brave
men dash out to cut the wire and are killed; others take their places
and are killed; others step out with too great a pride even to stoop,
and pull up the supports of the wires and fling them down, and fall dead
on top of them, having perhaps cleared a couple of yards. Then a couple
of machine guns open on the survivors and kill them all in thirty
seconds, with the concentrated fire of a battalion.
The supports come up, and hear about the wire from some wounded man who
has crawled back through the scrub. They send back word, "Held up by
wire," and in time the message comes to the telephone which has just
been blown to pieces by a shell. Presently when the telephone is
repaired, the message reaches the gunners, who fire high explosive
shells on to the wire, and on to the slopes where the machine guns may
be hidden. Then the supports go on over the flowers and are met midway
by a concentrated fire of shells, shrapnel, machine guns and rifles.
Those who are not killed lie down among the flowers and begin to scrape
little heaps of earth with their hands to give protection to their
heads. In the light sandy marl this does not take long, though many are
blown to pieces or hit in the back as they scrape. As before, they
cannot see how the rest of the attack is faring, nor even where the
other platoons of the battalion are; they lie scraping in the roots of
daffodils and lilies, while bullets sing and shriek a foot or two over
their heads. A man peering from his place in the flowers may make out
that the man next to him, some three yards away, is dead, and that the
man beyond is praying, the man beyond him cursing, and the man beyond
him out of his mind from nerves or thirst.
Long hours pass, but the air above them never ceases to cry like a live
thing with bullets flying. Men are killed or maimed, and the wounded cry
for water. Men get up to give them water and are killed. Shells fall at
regular intervals along the field. The waiting men count the seconds
between the shells to check the precision of the battery's fire. Some of
the bursts fling the blossoms and bulbs of flowers into the bodies of
men, where they are found long afterwards by the X-rays. Bursts and
roars of fire on either flank tell of some intense moment in other parts
of the line. Every feeling of terror and mental anguish and anxiety goes
through the mind of each man there, and is put down by resolve.
The supports come up, they rise with a cheer, and get out of the
accursed flowers, into a gulley where some men of their regiment are
already lying dead. There is a little wood to their front; they make for
that, and suddenly come upon a deep and narrow Turk trench full of men.
This is their first sight of the enemy. They leap down into the trench
and fight hand to hand, kill and are killed, in the long grave already
dug. They take the trench, but opening from the trench are saps, which
the Turks still hold. Men are shot dead at these saps by Turk
sharpshooters cunningly screened within them. Bullets fall in particular
places in the trench from snipers hidden in the trees of the wood. The
men send back for bombs, others try to find out where the rest of the
battalion lies, or send word that from the noise of the fire there must
be a battery of machine guns beyond the wood, if the guns would shell it.
Presently, before the bombs come, bombs begin to drop among them from
the Turks. Creeping up, the men catch them in their hands before they
explode and fling them back so that they burst among the Turks. Some
have their hands blown off, other their heads, in doing this, but the
bloody game of catch goes on till no Turks are left in the sap, only a
few wounded groaning men who slowly bleed to death there. After long
hours, the supports come up and a storm of high explosives searches the
little wood, and then with a cheer the remnant goes forward out of the
trench into the darkness of the pines. Fire opens on them from snipers
in the trees and from machine guns everywhere; they drop and die, and
the survivors see no enemy, only their friends falling and a place where
no living thing can pass. Men find themselves suddenly alone, with all
their friends dead, and no enemy in sight, but the rush of bullets
filling the air. They go back to the trench, not afraid, but in a kind
of maze, and as they take stock and count their strength there comes the
roar of the Turkish war cry, the drum-like proclamation of the faith,
and the Turks come at them with the bayonet. Then that lonely remnant of
a platoon stands to it with rapid fire, and the machine gun rattles like
a motor bicycle, and some ribald or silly song goes up, and the Turks
fail to get home, but die or waver and retreat and are themselves
charged as they turn. It is evening now; the day has passed in long
hours of deep experience, and the men have made two hundred yards. They
send back for supports and orders, link up, if they are lucky, with some
other part of their battalion, whose adventures, fifty yards away, have
been as intense, but wholly different, and prepare the Turk trench for
the night. Presently word reaches them from some faraway H.Q. (some
dug-out five hundred yards back, in what seems, by comparison, like
peaceful England) that there are no supports, and that the orders are to
hold the line at all costs and prepare for a fresh advance on the
morrow. Darkness falls, and ammunition and water come up, and the
stretcher-bearers hunt for the wounded by the groans, while the Turks
search the entire field with shell to kill the supports which are not
there. Some of the men in the trench creep out to their front, and are
killed there as they fix a wire entanglement. The survivors make ready
for the Turk attack, certain soon to come. There is no thought of sleep;
it is too cold for sleep; the men shiver as they stare into the night;
they take the coats of the dead, and try to get a little warmth. There
is no moon and the rain begins. The marl at the bottom of the trench is
soon a sticky mud, and the one dry patch is continually being sniped. A
few exhausted ones fall not into sleep but into nervous dreams, full of
twitches and cries, like dogs' nightmares, and away at sea some ship
opens with her great guns at an unseen target up the hill. The terrific
crashes shake the air; some one sees a movement in the grass and fires;
others start up and fire. The whole irregular line starts up and fires,
the machine guns rattle, the officers curse, and the guns behind,
expecting an attack, send shells into the woods. Then slowly the fire
drops and dies, and stray Turks, creeping up, fling bombs into the
trench.
This kind of fighting, between isolated bodies of men advancing in a
great concerted tactical movement stretching right across the Peninsula,
went on throughout the 6th, the 7th and the 8th of May, and ended on the
evening of the 8th in a terrific onslaught of the whole line, covered by
a great artillery. The final stage of the battle was a sight of stirring
and awful beauty. The Allied line went forward steadily behind the
moving barrier of the explosions of their shells. Every gun on both
sides opened and maintained a fire dreadful to hear and see. Our men
were fighting for a little patch of ground vital not so much to the
success of the undertaking, the clearing of the Narrows, as to their
existence on the Peninsula. In such a battle, each platoon, each
section, each private soldier influences the result, and "pays as
current coin in that red purchase" as the brigadier. The working parties
on the beaches left their work (it is said) to watch and cheer that last
advance. It was a day of the unmatchable clear Ægean spring; Samothrace
and Euboea were stretched out in the sunset like giants watching the
chess, waiting, it seemed, almost like human things, as they had waited
for the fall of Troy and the bale-fires of Agamemnon. Those watchers saw
the dotted order of our advance stretching across the Peninsula, moving
slowly forward, and halting and withering away, among fields of flowers
of spring and the young corn that would never come to harvest. They saw
the hump of Achi Baba flicker and burn and roll up to heaven in a swathe
of blackness, and multitudinous brightness changing the face of the
earth, and the dots of our line still coming, still moving forward, and
halting and withering away, but still moving up among the flashes and
the darkness, more men, and yet more men, from the fields of sacred
France, from the darkness of Senegal, from sheep-runs at the ends of the
earth, from blue-gum-forests, and sunny islands, places of horses and
good fellows, from Irish pastures and glens, and from many a Scotch and
English city and village and quiet farm; they went on and they went on,
up ridges blazing with explosion into the darkness of death. Sometimes,
as the light failed, and peak after peak that had been burning against
the sky, grew rigid as the colour faded, the darkness of the great
blasts hid sections of the line, but when the darkness cleared they were
still there, line after line of dots, still more, still moving forward
and halting and withering away, and others coming, and halting and
withering away, and others following, as though those lines were not
flesh and blood and breaking nerve but some tide of the sea coming in
waves that fell yet advanced, that broke a little further, and gained
some yard in breaking, and were then followed, and slowly grew, that
halted and seemed to wither, and then gathered and went on, till night
covered those moving dots, and the great slope was nothing but a
blackness spangled with the flashes of awful fire.
What can be said of that advance? The French were on the right, the
Twenty-ninth Division on the left, some Australians and New Zealanders
(brought down from Anzac) in support. It was their thirteenth day of
continual battle, and who will ever write the story of even one
half-hour of that thirteenth day? Who will ever know one hundredth part
of the deeds of heroism done in them, by platoons and sections and
private soldiers, who offered their lives without a thought to help some
other part of the line, who went out to cut wire, or brought up water
and ammunition, or cheered on some bleeding remnant of a regiment,
halting on that hill of death, and kept their faces to the shrapnel and
the never-ceasing pelt of bullets, as long as they had strength to go
and light to see? They brought the line forward from a quarter of a mile
to six hundred yards further into the Peninsula; they dug in after dark
on the line they had won, and for the next thirty-six hours they stood
to arms to beat back the charges of the Turks who felt themselves
threatened at the heart.
Our army had won their hold upon the Peninsula. On the body of a dead
Turk officer was a letter written the night before to his wife, a tender
letter, filled mostly with personal matters. In it was the phrase,
"These British are the finest fighters in the world. We have chosen the
wrong friends."
IV
So great is the heat that the dust rises.
_The Song of Roland._
During the next three weeks, the Allied troops made small advances in
parts of the lines held by them at Anzac and Cape Helles. Fighting was
continuous in both zones, there was always much (and sometimes intense)
artillery fire. The Turks frequently attacked in force, sometimes in
very great force, but were repulsed. Our efforts were usually
concentrated on some redoubt, stronghold, or salient, in the nearer
Turkish lines, the fire from which galled our trenches, or threatened
any possible advance. These posts were either heavily bombarded and then
rushed under the cover of a _feu de barrage_, or carried by surprise
attack. Great skill and much dashing courage were shown in these
assaults. The emplacements of machine guns were seized and the guns
destroyed, dangerous trenches or parts of trenches were carried and
filled in, and many roosts or hiding places of snipers were made
untenable. These operations were on a small scale, and were designed to
improve the position then held by us, rather than to carry the whole
line further up the Peninsula. Sometimes they failed, but by far the
greater number succeeded, so that by these methods, eked out by ruses,
mines, clever invention and the most dare-devil bravery, parts of our
lines were advanced by more than a hundred yards.
[Illustration: Anzac from the Sea]
On the 4th of June, a second great attack was made by the Allied troops
near Cape Helles. Like the attack of the 6th-8th May, it was an advance
of the whole line, from the Straits to the sea, against the enemy's
front line trenches. As before, the French were on the right and the
29th Division on the left, but between them, in this advance, were the
R.N. Division and the newly arrived 42nd Division. Our men advanced
after a prolonged and terrible bombardment, which so broke down the Turk
defence that the works were carried all along the line, except in one
place, on the left of the French sector and in one other place, on our
own left, near the sea. Our advance, as before, varied in depth from a
quarter of a mile to six hundred yards; all of it carried by a rush, in
a short time, owing to the violence of the artillery preparation, though
with heavy losses from shrapnel and machine-gun fire. In this attack,
the 42nd or East Lancashire Division received its baptism of fire. Even
those who had seen the men of the 29th Division in the battles for the
landing admitted that "nothing could have been finer" than the extreme
gallantry of these newly landed men. The Manchester Brigade and two
companies of the 5th Lancashire Fusiliers advanced with the most
glorious and dashing courage, routed the Turks, carried both their lines
of trenches; and one battalion, the 6th, very nearly carried the village
of Krithia; there was, in fact, no entrenched line between them and the
top of Achi Baba.
But in this campaign we were to taste, and be upon the brink of victory
in every battle, yet have the prize dashed from us, by some failure
elsewhere, each time. So, in this first rush, when, for the first time,
our men felt that they, not the Turks, were the real attackers, the
victory was not to remain with us. We had no high explosive shell and
not enough shrapnel shell to deny to the Turks the use of their superior
numbers and to hold them in a beaten state. They rallied and made strong
counter attacks especially upon a redoubt or earthwork-fortress called
the "Haricot," on the left of the French sector, which the French had
stormed an hour before and garrisoned with Senegalese troops. The Turks
heavily shelled this work and then rushed it; the Senegalese could not
hold it; the French could not support it; and the Turks won it.
Unfortunately, the Haricot enfiladed the lines we had won. In a little
while the Turks developed from it a deadly enfilade fire upon the R.N.
Division which had won the Turk trenches to the west of it. The R.N.
Division was forced to fall back and in doing so uncovered the right of
the Brigade of Manchesters beyond it to the westward. The Manchesters
were forced to give ground, the French were unable to make a new attack
upon the Haricot, so that by nightfall our position was less good than
it had been at half-past twelve.
But for the fall of the Haricot the day would have been a notable
victory for ourselves. Still, over three miles of the Allied front, our
lines had been pushed forward from 200 to 400 yards. This, in modern war
is a big advance, but it brings upon the conquerors a very severe labor
of digging. The trenches won from the defence have to be converted to the
uses of the attack and linked up, by saps and communication-trenches,
with the works from which the attack advanced. All this labour had to be
done by our men in the midst of bitter fighting, for the Turks fought
hard to win back these trenches in many bloody counter attacks, and (as
always happened, after each advance) outlying works and trenches, from
which fire could be brought to bear upon the newly won ground, had to be
carried, filled in, or blown up before the new line was secure.
A little after dawn on the 21st June the French stormed and won the
Haricot redoubt, and advanced the right of the Allied position by 600
yards; the Turkish counter attacks were bloodily defeated.
In the forenoon of the 28th June, the English divisions advanced the
left of the Allied position by a full 1,000 yards. This attack, which
was one of the most successful of the campaign, was the first of which
it could be said that it was a victory. Of course our presence upon the
Peninsula was in itself a victory, but in this battle we were not trying
to land nor to secure ourselves, but (for the first time) to force a
decision. Three of our divisions challenged the greater part of the Turk
army and beat it. And here, for the first time in the operations, we
felt, what all our soldiers had expected, that want of fresh men in
reserve to make a success decisive, which afterwards lost us the
campaign.
Our enemies have often said, that the English cannot plan nor execute an
attack. In this battle of June 28th, the attack was a perfect piece of
planning and execution. Everything was exactly timed, everything worked
smoothly. Ten thousand soldiers, not one of whom had had more than six
months' training, advanced uphill after an artillery preparation and won
two lines of elaborately fortified trenches, by the bayonet alone. Then,
while these men consolidated and made good the ground which they had
won, the artillery lengthened their fuses and bombarded the ground
beyond them. When the artillery ceased, ten thousand fresh soldiers
climbed out of the English lines, ran forward, leaped across the two
lines of Turk trench already taken and took three more lines of trench,
each line a fortress in itself. Besides advancing our position a
thousand yards, this attack forced back the right of the Turks from the
sea, and won a strong position between the sea and Krithia, almost
turning Achi Baba. But much more than this was achieved. The great
triumph of the day was the certainty then acquired that the Turks were
beaten, that they were no longer the fierce and ardent fighters who had
rushed V beach in the dark, but a shaken company who had caught the
habit of defeat and might break at any moment. They were beaten; we had
beaten them at every point and they knew that they were beaten. Every
man in the French and British lines knew that the Turks were at the
breaking point. We had only to strike while the iron was hot to end them.
As happened afterwards, after the battle of August, we could not strike
while the iron was hot; we had not the men nor the munitions. Had the
fifty thousand men who came there in July and August but been there in
June, our men could have kept on striking. But they were not there in
June, and our victory of the 28th could not be followed up. More than a
month passed before it could be followed up. During that month the Turks
dug themselves new fortresses, brought up new guns, made new stores of
ammunition, and remade their army. Their beaten troops were withdrawn
and replaced by the very pick and flower of the Turkish Empire. When we
attacked again, we found a very different enemy; the iron was cold, we
had to begin again from the beginning.
Thirty-six hours after our June success, at midnight in the night of
June 29-30th, the Turks made a counter attack, not at Cape Helles, where
their men were shaken, but at Anzac, where perhaps they felt our menace
more acutely. A large army of Turks, about 30,000 strong, ordered by
Enver Pasha "to drive the foreigners into the sea or never to look upon
his face again," attacked the Anzac position under cover of the fire of
a great artillery. They were utterly defeated with the loss of about a
quarter of their strength, some 7-8,000 killed and wounded.
All this fighting proved clearly that the Turks, with all their power of
fresh men, their closeness to their reserves, and their superior
positions, could not beat us from what we had secured, nor keep us from
securing more. Our advance into the Peninsula, though slow and paid for
with much life, was sure and becoming less slow. What we had won we had
fought hard for and never ceased to fight hard for, but we had won it
and could hold it, and with increasing speed add to it, and the Turks
knew this as well as we did. But early in May something happened which
had a profound result upon the course of the operations. It is necessary
to write of it at length, if only to show the reader that this
Dardanelles Campaign was not a war in itself, but a part of a war
involving most of Europe and half of Asia, and that, that being so, it
was affected by events in other parts of the war, as deeply as it
affected those parts in turn by its own events.
No one, of the many who spoke to me about the campaign, knew or
understood that the campaign, as planned, was not to be, solely, a
French and English venture, but (in its later stages) a double attack
upon the Turkish power, by ourselves, on the Peninsula and the
Hellespont, and by the Russians, on the shores of the Black Sea. The
double attack, threatening Turkey at the heart, was designed to force
the Turks to divide their strength, and, by causing uneasiness among the
citizens, to keep in and about Constantinople a large army which might
otherwise wreck our Mesopotamian expedition, threaten India and Egypt
and prevent the Grand Duke Nicholas from advancing from the Caucasus on
Erzerum. But as the Polish campaign developed adversely to Russia, it
became clear that it would be impossible for her to give the assistance
she had hoped.