rally to the living of their people in a time of storm, those fields of
hell below Koja Chemen, won by the sweat and blood and dying agony of
our thousands, must have answered with a ghostly muster of English souls
in the afternoon of that eighth of August. There was the storm, there
was the crisis, the one picked hour, to which this death and mangling
and dying misery and exultation had led. Then was the hour for a casting
off of self, and a setting aside of every pain and longing and sweet
affection, a giving up of all that makes a man to be something which
makes a race, and a going forward to death resolvedly to help out their
brothers high up above in the shell bursts and the blazing gorse. Surely
all through the eighth of August our unseen dead were on that field,
blowing the horn of Roland, the unheard, unheeded horn, the horn of
heroes in the dolorous pass, asking for the little that heroes ask, but
asking in vain. If ever the great of England cried from beyond death to
the living they cried then. "De ço qui calt. Demuret i unt trop."
All through the morning of that day, the Commander-in-Chief, on watch at
his central station, had waited with growing anxiety for the advance
from the Suvla Beaches. Till the afternoon the critical thrust on Chunuk
and the great Turk pressure at Lone Pine made it impossible for him to
leave his post to intervene, but, in the afternoon, seeing that neither
wireless nor telephone messages could take the place of personal vision
and appeal, he took the risk of cutting himself adrift from the main
conflict, hurried to Suvla, landed, and found the great battle of the
war, that should have brought peace to all that Eastern world, being
lost by minutes before his eyes.
Only one question mattered then: "Was there still time?" Had the Turks
made good their march and crowned those hills, or could our men
forestall them? It was now doubtful, but the point was vital, not only
to the battle, but to half the world in travail. It had to be put to the
test. A hundred years ago, perhaps even fifty years ago, all could have
been saved. Often in those old days, a Commander-in-Chief could pull a
battle out of the fire and bring halted or broken troops to victory.
Then, by waving a sword, and shouting a personal appeal, the resolute
soul could pluck the hearts of his men forward in a rush that nothing
could stem. So Wolfe took Quebec, so Desaix won Marengo, so Bonaparte
swept the bridge at Lodi and won at Arcola; so Cæsar overcame the Nervii
in the terrible day, and wrecked the Republic at Pharsalia. So Sherman
held the landing at Shiloh and Farragut pitted his iron heart against
iron ships at Fort Jackson. So Sir Ian Hamilton himself snatched victory
from the hesitation at Elandslaagte. Then the individual's will could
take instant effect, but then the individual's front was not a five mile
front of wilderness, the men were under his hand, within sight and sound
of him and not committed by order to another tactical project. There, at
Suvla, there was no chance for these heroic methods. Suvla was the
modern battle field, where nothing can be done quickly except the firing
of a machine gun. On the modern field, especially on such a field as
Suvla, where the troops were scattered in the wilderness, it may take
several hours for an order to pass from one wing to the other. In this
case it was not an order that was to pass, but a counter-order; the
order had already gone, for an attack at dawn on the morrow.
All soldiers seem agreed, that even with authority to back it, a
counter-order, on a modern battlefield, to urge forward halted troops,
takes time to execute. Sir Ian Hamilton's determination to seize those
hills could not spare the time; too much time had already gone. He
ordered an advance at all costs with whatever troops were not scattered,
but only four battalions could be found in any way ready to move. It was
now 5 P.M.: there were perhaps three more hours of light. The four
battalions were ordered to advance at once to make good what they could
of the hills fronting the bay before the Turks forestalled them. At dawn
the general attack as already planned was to support them. Unfortunately
the four battalions were less ready than was thought; they were not able
to advance at once, nor for ten all-precious hours. They did not begin
to advance till 4 o'clock the next morning (the 9th of August) and even
then the rest of the Division which was to support them was not in
concert with them. They attacked the hills to the north of Anafarta
Sagir, but they were now too late, the Turks were there before them, in
great force, with their guns, and the thrust, which the day before could
have been met by (at most) five Turk battalions without artillery was
now parried and thwarted. Presently the Division attacked with great
gallantry, over burning scrub, seized Ismail and was then checked and
forced back to the Chocolate Hills. The left had failed. The main blow
of the battle on Sari Bair was to have no support from Suvla.
The main blow was given, none the less, by the troops near Chunuk. Three
columns were formed in the pitchy blackness of the very early morning of
the 9th, two to seize and clear Chunuk and Hill Q, the third to pass
from Hill Q on the wave of the assault to the peak of Koja Chemen. The
first two columns were on the lower slopes of Chunuk and in the fields
about The Farm, with orders to attack at dawn. The third column
consisting wholly of English troops was not yet on the ground, but
moving during the night up the Chailak Dere. The Dere was jammed with
pack-mules, ammunition and wounded men; it was pitch dark and the column
made bad going, and those leading it were doubtful of the way.
Brigadier-General Baldwin, who commanded, left his Brigade in the Dere,
went to the Headquarters of the 1st column, and brought back guides to
lead his Brigade into position. The guides led him on in the darkness,
till they realised that they were lost. The Brigadier marched his men
back to the Chailak, and then, still in pitch darkness, up a nullah into
the Aghyl Dere, and from there, in growing light, towards The Farm. This
wandering in the darkness had tragical results.
At half-past four the guns from the ships and the army opened on Chunuk,
and the columns moved to the assault. Soon the peaks of their objective
were burning like the hills of hell to light them on their climb to
death, and they went up in the half-darkness to the storm of a volcano
spouting fire, driving the Turks before them. Some of the Warwicks and
South Lancashires were the first upon the top of Chunuk; Major Allanson,
leading the 6th Gurkhas, was the first on the ridge between Chunuk and
Hill Q. Up on the crests came the crowding sections; the Turks were
breaking and falling back. Our men passed over the crests and drove the
Turks down on the other side. Victory was flooding up over Chunuk like
the Severn tide: our men had scaled the scarp, and there below them lay
the ditch, the long grey streak of the Hellespont, the victory and the
reward of victory. The battle lay like a field ripe to the harvest, our
men had but to put in the sickle. The Third Column was the sickle of
that field, that Third Column which had lost its way in the blackness of
the wilderness. Even now that Third Column was coming up the hill below;
in a few minutes it would have been over the crest, going on to victory
with the others. Then, at that moment of time, while our handful on the
hilltop waited for the weight of the Third Column to make its thrust a
death-blow, came the most tragical thing in all that tragical campaign.
It was barely daylight when our men won the hilltop. The story is that
our men moving on the crest were mistaken for Turks, or (as some think)
that there was some difference in officers' watches, some few minutes'
delay in beginning the fire of the guns, and therefore some few minutes'
delay in stopping the bombardment, which had been ordered to continue
upon the crest for three-quarters of an hour from 4.30 A.M. Whatever the
cause, whether accident, fate, mistake, or the daily waste and confusion
of battle, our own guns searched the hilltop for some minutes too long,
and thinned out our brave handful with a terrible fire. They were caught
in the open and destroyed there; the Turks charged back upon the remnant
and beat them off the greater part of the crest. Only a few minutes
after this the Third Column came into action in support: too late.
The Turks beat them down the hill to The Farm, but could not drive the
men of the First Column from the southwestern half of the top of the
Chunuk. All through the hard and bloody day of the 9th of August the
Turks tried to carry this peak, but never quite could, though the day
was one long succession of Turk attacks, the Turks fresh and in great
strength, our men weary from three terrible days and nights and only a
battalion strong, since the peak would not hold more. The New Zealanders
and some of the 13th Division held that end of Chunuk. They were in
trenches which had been dug under fire, partly by themselves, partly by
the Turks. In most places these trenches were only scratchings in the
ground, since neither side on that blazing and stricken hill could stand
to dig. Here and there, in sheltered patches, the trenches were three
feet deep, but whether three feet deep or three inches, all were badly
sited, and in some parts had only ten yards field of fire. In these pans
or scratchings our men fought all day, often hand to hand, usually under
a pelt of every kind of fire, often amid a shower of bombs since the
Turks could creep up under cover to within so few yards. Our men lost
very heavily during the day but at nightfall we still held the peak.
After dark the 6th Loyal North Lancashires relieved the garrison, took
over the trenches, did what they could to strengthen them, and advanced
them by some yards here and there. At four o'clock on the morning of the
10th, the 5th Wiltshires came up to support them and lay down behind the
trenches in the ashes, sand and scattered rubble of the hilltop. Both
battalions were exhausted from four days and nights of continual
fighting, but in very good heart. At this time, these two battalions
marked the extreme right of our new line; on their left, stretching down
to The Farm, were the 10th Hampshires, and near The Farm the remains of
the Third Column under General Baldwin. There may have been in all some
five thousand men on Chunuk and within a quarter of a mile of it round
The Farm.
In the darkness before dawn when our men on the hill were busy digging
themselves better cover for the day's battle, the Turks, now strongly
reinforced from Bulair and Asia, assaulted Chunuk with not less than
15,000 men. They came on in a monstrous mass, packed shoulder to
shoulder, in some places eight deep, in others three or four deep.
Practically all their first line were shot by our men, practically all
the second line were bayoneted, but the third line got into our trenches
and overwhelmed the garrison. Our men fell back to the second line of
trenches and rallied and fired, but the Turks overwhelmed that line too
and then with their packed multitude they paused and gathered like a
wave, burst down on the Wiltshire Regiment, and destroyed it almost to a
man. Even so, the survivors, outnumbered 40 to 1, formed and charged
with the bayonet, and formed and charged a second time, with a courage
which makes the charge of the Light Brigade seem like a dream. But it
was a hopeless position, the Turks came on like the sea, beat back all
before them, paused for a moment, set rolling down the hill upon our men
a number of enormous round bombs, which bounded into our lines and
burst, and then following up this artillery they fell on the men round
The Farm in the most bloody and desperate fight of the campaign.
Even as they topped Chunuk and swarmed down to engulf our right, our
guns opened upon them in a fire truly awful, but thousands came alive
over the crest and went down to the battle below. Stragglers running
from the first rush put a panic in the Aghyl Dere, where bearers,
doctors, mules and a multitude of wounded were jammed up with soldiers
trying to get up to the fight. Some of our men held up against this
thrust of the Turks, and in that first brave stand, General Baldwin was
killed. Then our line broke, the Turks got fairly in among our men with
a weight which bore all before it, and what followed was a long
succession of British rallies to a tussle body to body, with knives and
stones and teeth, a fight of wild beasts in the ruined cornfields of The
Farm. Nothing can be said of that fight, no words can describe nor any
mind imagine it, except as a roaring and blazing hour of killing. Our
last reserves came up to it, and the Turks were beaten back; very few of
their men reached their lines alive. The Turk dead lay in thousands all
down the slopes of the hill; but the crest of the hill, the prize,
remained in Turk hands, not in ours.
That ended the battle of the 6th-10th of August. We had beaten off the
Turks, but our men were too much exhausted to do more. They could not go
up the hill again. Our thrust at Sari Bair had failed. It had just
failed, by a few minutes, though unsupported from the left. Even then,
at the eleventh hour, two fresh battalions and a ton of water would have
made Chunuk ours, but we had neither the men nor the water; Sari was not
to be our hill. Our men fought for four days and nights in a wilderness
of gorse and precipice to make her ours. They fought in a blazing sun,
without rest, with little food and with almost no water, on hills on
fire and on crags rotting to the tread. They went, like all their
brothers in that Peninsula, on a forlorn hope, and by bloody pain they
won the image and the taste of victory, and then, when their reeling
bodies had burst the bars, so that our race might pass through, there
were none to pass, the door was open, but there were none to go through
it to triumph, and then, slowly, as strength failed, the door was shut
again, the bars were forged again, victory was hidden again, all was to
do again, and our brave men were but the fewer and the bitterer for all
their bloody sacrifice for the land they served. All was to do again
after the 10th of August, the great battle of the campaign was over. We
had made our fight, we had seen our enemy beaten and the prize
displayed, and then (as before at Helles) we had to stop for want of
men, till the enemy had remade his army and rebuilt his fort.
VI
The day passed, the night came, the King lay down in his vaulted room.
St. Gabriel came from God to call him. "Charles, summon the army of your
empire and go by forced marches into the land of Bire, to the city that
the pagans have besieged. The Christians call and cry for you." The
Emperor wished not to go. "God," he said, "how painful is my life." He
wept from his eyes, he tore his white beard.
_The end of the Song of Roland._
That, in a way, was the end of the campaign, for no other attempt to win
through was made. The Turks were shaken to the heart. Another battle
following at once might well have broken them. But we had not the men
nor the shells for another battle. In the five days' battle on the front
of twelve miles we had lost very little less than a quarter of our
entire army, and we had shot away most of our always scanty supply of
ammunition. We could not attack again till fifty thousand more men were
landed and the store of shells replenished. Those men and shells were
not near Gallipoli, but in England, where the war as a whole had to be
considered. The question to be decided, by those directing the war as a
whole, was, "should those men and shells be sent?" It was decided by the
High Direction, that they should not be sent: the effort therefore could
not be made.
Since the effort could not be made, the campaign declined into a
secondary operation, to contain large reserves of Turks, with their guns
and munitions, from use elsewhere, in Mesopotamia or in the Caucasus.
But before it became this, a well-planned and well-fought effort was
made from Suvla to secure our position by seizing the hills to the east
of the Bay. This attack took place on the 21st August, in intense heat,
across an open plain without cover of any kind, blazing throughout
nearly all its length with scrub fires. The 29th Division (brought up
from Cape Helles) carried Scimitar Hill with great dash, and was then
held up. The attack on Ismail Oglu failed. Two thrusts made by the men
of Anzac in the latter days of August, secured an important well, and
the Turk stronghold of Hill 60. This last success made the line from
Anzac to Suvla impregnable.
After this, since no big attempt could be made by the Allied Troops and
no big attempt was made by the enemy, the fighting settled down into
trench warfare on both sides. There was some shelling every day and
night, some machine gun and rifle fire, much sniping, great vigilance,
and occasional bombing and mining. The dysentery, which had been present
ever since the heats began, increased beyond all measure; very few men
in all that army were not attacked and weakened by it. Many thousands
went down with it; Mudros, Alexandria and Malta were filled with cases;
many died.
Those who remained, besides carrying on the war by daily and nightly
fire, worked continually with pick and shovel to improve the lines. Long
after the war, the goatherd on Gallipoli will lose his way in the miles
of trenches which zigzag from Cape Helles to Achi Baba and from Gaba
Tepe to Ejelmer Bay. They run to and fro in all that expanse of land,
some of them shallow, others deep cuttings in the marl, many of them
paved with stone or faced with concrete, most of them sided with little
caverns, leading far down (in a few cases) to rooms twenty feet under
the ground. Long after we are all dust the goats of Gallipoli will break
their legs in those pits and ditches, and over their coffee round the
fire the elders will say that they were dug by devils and the sons of
devils, and antiquarians will come from the west to dig there, and will
bring away shards of iron, and empty tins and bones. Fifty years ago
some French staff officers traced out the works round Durazzo, where
Pompey the Great fought just such another campaign, two thousand years
ago. Two thousand years hence, when this war is forgotten, those lines
under the ground will draw the staff officers of whatever country is
then the most cried for brains.
Those lines were the homes of thousands of our soldiers for half a year
and more. There they lived and did their cooking and washing, made their
jokes and sang their songs. There they sweated under their burdens, and
slept, and fell in to die. There they marched up the burning hill, where
the sand devils flung by the shells were blackening heaven, there they
lay in their dirty rags awaiting death, and there by thousands up and
down they lie buried, in little lonely graves where they fell, or in the
pits of the great engagements.
Those lines at Cape Helles, Anzac and Suvla, were once busy towns,
thronged by thousands of citizens whose going and coming and daily
labour were cheerful with singing, as though those places were mining
camps during a gold rush, instead of a perilous front where the fire
never ceased and the risk of death was constant. But for the noise of
war, coming in an irregular rattle, with solitary big explosions, the
screams of shells or the wild whistling crying of ricochets, they seemed
busy but very peaceful places. At night, from the sea, the lamps of the
dugouts on the cliffs were like the lights of seacoast towns in summer,
and the places seemingly as peaceful, but for the pop and rattle of fire
and the streaks of glare from the shells. There was always singing,
sometimes very good, and always beautiful, coming in the crash of war;
and always one heard the noises of the work of men, the beat of
piledrivers, wheels going over stones, and the little solid pobbing
noises, from bullets dropping in the sea.
I have said that those positions were like mining camps during a gold
rush. Ballarat, the Sacramento, and the camps of the Transvaal must have
looked strangely like those camps at Suvla and Cape Helles. Anzac at
night was like those crags of old building over the Arno at Florence; by
day it was a city of cliff dwellers, stirring memories of the race's
past. An immense expanse was visible from all these places; at Cape
Helles there was the plain rising gradually to Achi Baba, at Anzac a
wilderness of hills, at Suvla the same hills seen from below. Over all
these places came a strangeness of light, unlike anything to be seen in
the west, a light which made the hills clear and unreal at the same
time, softening their savagery into peace, till they seemed not hills
but swellings of the land, as though the land there had breathed-in and
risen a little. All the places were dust-coloured as soon as the flowers
had withered, a dark dust-coloured where the scrub grew (often almost
wine-dark like our own hills where heather grows) a pale sand colour,
where the scrub gave out, and elsewhere a paleness and a greyness as of
moss and lichen and old stone. On this sandy and dusty land, where even
the trees were grey and ghostly (olive and Eastern currant) the camps
were scattered, a little and a little, never much in one place on
account of shelling, till the impression given was one of multitude.
The signs of the occupation began far out at sea where the hospital
ships lay waiting for their freight. There were always some there,
painted white and green, lying outside the range of the big guns. Nearer
to the shore were the wrecks of ships, some of them sunk by our men, to
make breakwaters, some sunk by the Turk shells, some knocked to pieces
or washed ashore by foul weather. Nearly all these wrecks were of small
size, trawlers, drifters and little coastwise vessels such as peddle and
bring home fish on the English coasts. Closer in, right on the beaches,
were the bones of still smaller boats, pinnaces, cutters and lighters,
whose crews had been the men of the first landings. Men could not see
those wrecks without a thrill. There were piers at all the beaches, all
built under shell fire, to stand both shell fire and the sea, and at the
piers there was always much busy life, men singing at their work, horses
and mules disembarking, food and munitions and water discharging,
wounded going home and drafts coming ashore. On the beaches were the
hieroglyphs of the whole bloody and splendid story; there were the marks
and signs, which no one could mistake nor see unmoved.
Even after months of our occupation the traces were there off the main
tracks. A man had but to step from one of the roads into the scrub, and
there they lay, relics of barbed wire, blown aside in tangles, round
shrapnel-bullets in the sand, empty cartridge-cases, clips of cartridge
cases bent double by a blow yet undischarged, pieces of flattened rifle
barrel, rags of leather, broken bayonets, jags and hacks of shell, and,
in little hollows, little heaps of cartridge-cases, where some man had
lain to fire for hour after hour, often until he died at his post, on
the 25th of April. Here, too, one came upon the graves of soldiers,
sometimes alone, sometimes three or four together, each with an
inscribed cross and border of stones from the beach. Privates, sergeants
and officers lay in those graves and by them, all day long, the work
which they had made possible by that sacrifice on the 25th, went on in a
stream, men and munitions going up to the front, and wounded and the
dying coming down, while the explosions of the cannon trembled through
the earth to them and the bullets piped and fell over their heads.
But the cities of those camps were not cities of the dead, they were
cities of intense life, cities of comradeship and resolve, unlike the
cities of peace. At Mudros, all things seemed little, for there men were
dwarfed by their setting; they were there in ships which made even a
full battalion seem only a cluster of heads. On the Peninsula they
seemed to have come for the first time to full stature. There they were
bigger than their surroundings. There they were naked manhood pitted
against death in the desert and more than holding their own.