THE EPIC OF THE DARDANELLES BEGINS
Closer yet, until the tightening
Strain of rapt excitement heightening
Grows oppressive. Ha! like lightning
On his enemy he launches.
ADAM LINDSAY GORDON.
With Death on the off-side lead,
And Duty stern at the limber,
The men of the British breed
Strain sinews, steel, and timber.
With jangling bar and trace,
And trail-eyes all a-rattle,
The guns rush thundering in the race,
Where "last gun in" is a sore disgrace:
For the drivers drive at a reckless pace
When the guns go into battle.
WILL LAWSON.
When the full story of the Great War comes, at last, to be written, no
part of it will thrill our children or our children's children more, or
make them prouder of their race, than the chapters which shall tell of
how men of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Australia, New Zealand,
and India fought stubbornly side by side, and side by side with our
gallant French allies, on those hills and plains of Gallipoli.
All the country thereabouts has been dedicated to war and romance from
time immemorial. At its entrance, between Kum Kale and Sedd-el-Bahr, the
Dardanelles is only two miles wide; it broadens to five miles as you go
in, and contracts, when you reach the narrows, to the width of a single
mile. Here it was, nearly five hundred years before Christ, that Xerxes
threw a bridge of boats across for his conquering army to pass over; and
here it was that Leander nightly swam the mile of water that separates
Abydos from Sestos, where Hero lived. On the eastern shore, near the
mouth of the Dardanelles, and within sight and sound of the thunderous
battles of to-day, is the site of that ancient Troy whose long siege
rages for ever in Homer's Iliad; but the Greek and Trojan heroes he has
immortalised knew no such terrific fighting, did no such deeds of mighty
valour as have fallen to the share of the incomparable heroes who are
fighting there now.
The powerful forts along either coast-line, the masked batteries among
the hills, the torpedo tubes cunningly concealed on the rocky beaches,
the sunken-mine fields that bar the channel, and the floating mines that
can be sent drifting down on the current to strike and blast an enemy's
ships to the bottom, make the forcing of the Dardanelles an infinitely
more difficult undertaking than it was when Admiral Duckworth made a
bold dash for it and got through with his fleet in 1807; and there are
not wanting amateur experts among our arm-chair critics who say
confidently that the dispatch of the British and French fleets to force
a passage there, last February, without the support of a military
expedition on shore, was a casual and wild blunder. It may have been;
but it were more rational not to pass judgment until we have all the
evidence before us. It was a sudden and vigorous attempt, and we should
have been loud in our praise of the daring initiative of whoever was
responsible for it if it had succeeded; but it failed, as even some of
our best-laid schemes are bound to do, for the age of miracles is past,
though the grumblers who expect us to win every time and the enemy to
lose every time do not appear to be aware of this.
The most we can safely say is that the February attack by the allied
fleets was an unfortunate adventure, for it not only failed, it put the
Turks on the alert and spurred them to strengthen their defences and
hurry reinforcements to the Peninsula until they had some 200,000 men
garrisoning the forts and ready in mile behind mile of trenches to meet
the British and French troops that were presently to be sent against
them.
On the 13th March General Sir Ian Hamilton left London with his staff to
take command of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Army, and a day or two
later landed at Tenedos in the Ægean Sea, where, in the dim past, the
Greeks had landed when they marched to besiege Troy. After consultations
with Vice-Admiral de Robeck, commanding the British Eastern
Mediterranean Fleet, with General d'Amade, commander of the French Corps
Expéditionnaire, and Contre-Amiral Guepratte, who commanded the French
squadron, Sir Ian made careful reconnaissances up the Gulf of Saros
along the outer coast of Gallipoli, and rapidly matured his plan of
campaign, using Malta as a base of operations, bringing troops thence
and from Egypt and concentrating his vast fleet of loaded transports in
Mudros Bay, off the Island of Lemnos, which lies out in the Ægean, some
twenty miles before the gates of the Dardanelles. Here, with new
regiments from the British Isles, from India, and from France, were
Australians and New Zealanders who had received their baptism of fire in
the Suez Canal campaign; and whilst they lingered for the transport
arrangements to be completed they improved the shining hours, or, rather
the hours that had no shine in them, by practising every evening the
work of rapidly disembarking and making a landing on the shores of
Mudros Bay, their genial comrades, the bluejackets, helping them with
tips in the art of climbing rope-ladders, in steering a boat and using a
boathook.
"What can I say about the Army?" says Mr. Ashmead Bartlett, in his
"Dispatches from the Dardanelles." "It is no ordinary body of men. It is
essentially Imperial in its composition, and only the British Empire
could have brought together such a force from all corners of the earth.
Also the majority of the men are volunteers and Colonials. It is the
great counter-attack of Australia against the enemy in the east whilst
our regular armies are holding the line so gallantly in the west.... I
do not suppose that any country in its palmiest days ever sent forth to
the field of battle a finer body of men than these Australian, New
Zealand, and Tasmanian troops. Physically they are the finest lot of men
I have ever seen in any part of the world. In fact, I had no idea such a
race of giants existed in the twentieth century." Sir Ian Hamilton, too,
was full of praise for his troops from "down under," and considered them
"a magnificent lot of men, and as keen as mustard for the job."
In the afternoon of 23rd April an impressive battle service was held
aboard the crowded transports, and soldiers and sailors stood
bare-headed and listened reverently whilst the chaplain prayed for them,
and that, fighting a clean fight for the rights of humanity, they might
be strengthened to go on unflinchingly in the face of every difficulty
and danger till their arms were crowned with victory. It was the last
consecration of those brave men to the high and perilous duty to which
they had given themselves. In the evening of the same day transports
carrying the troops who were to make the first landing on Gallipoli, and
act as a covering force for the main army, moved out of Mudros Bay, with
their convoy of warships, and the rest of the expedition followed in
their track–a mighty fleet of nearly a hundred transports in all,
guarded on every side by a wonderful array of gunboats, destroyers,
swift armoured-cruisers, and stately dreadnoughts, including the mammoth
_Queen Elizabeth_.
On the morning of the 24th April the transports anchored off Tenedos.
The day was occupied in transferring the troops to a number of cutters
and smaller war vessels, and at midnight these were taken in tow by
certain of the larger ships, and, silently and without lights, moved
away through the darkness, stringing out into long, serpentine lines,
towards Gallipoli.
The expedition was divided into two landing parties. Whilst the French
created a diversion by bombarding Kum Kale, on the eastern coast, strong
forces of English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh were to land at five
points, on the beach below Krithia, above Cape Tekeh, at Cape Helles, at
Sedd-el-Bahr, and near Totts Battery, on the extreme end of the
Peninsula; and after a fierce half-hour's shelling of the forts and
defences by the fleet this landing was carried out with the most
brilliant success. Simultaneously the Australians and New Zealanders,
who had left Tenedos in advance of the rest, were to penetrate the Gulf
of Saros and land above Gaba Tepe, where the Peninsula narrows to a sort
of bottle-neck, to keep the Turks fully engaged there and prevent them
from dispatching reinforcements to oppose the landing farther south. It
is a rugged and difficult part of the coast, this above Gaba Tepe, and
had been selected for that reason, because the enemy was less likely to
anticipate an attack there and would be less prepared for it.
"The beach on which the landing was actually effected," writes Sir Ian
Hamilton, in his vivid report, "is a very narrow strip of sand, about a
thousand yards in length, bounded on the north and south by two small
promontories. At its southern extremity a deep ravine, with exceedingly
steep, scrub-clad sides, runs inland in a north-easterly direction. Near
the northern end of the beach a small but steep gully runs up into the
hills at right angles to the shore. Between the ravine and the gully the
whole of the beach is backed by the seaward face of the spur which forms
the north-western side of the ravine. From the top of the spur the
ground falls almost sheer, except near the southern limit of the beach,
where gentler slopes give access to the mouth of the ravine behind.
Further inland lie in a tangled knot the under-features of Saribair,
separated by deep ravines which take a most confusing diversity of
direction. Sharp spurs, covered with dense scrub and falling away in
many places in precipitous sandy cliffs, radiate from the principal mass
of the mountain, from which they run north-west, south-west, and south
to the coast."
Another description says that the strip of beach with the cliffs sloping
steeply up from it has resemblances to Folkestone; another compares it
with its wild hinterland to the grimness and barrenness of Dartmoor; and
yet another pictures the whole Peninsula as like a sea petrified in the
height of a storm, heaving to gaunt ridges and falling away into deep
troughs and hollows, to sweep up and over again in a wave-like
succession of tumultuous hills.
This was the terribly inhospitable country that the Australasians
approached warily in the smallest dark hours of the morning. The land
lay almost invisible in the black depths of the night; no sound came out
to them, and no light glimmered anywhere. Silently and shrouded in the
shadows the warships took up their appointed positions in readiness, at
the right moment, to cover the landing with a hail of shell-fire; the
steam pinnaces, with their strings of boats loaded to the gunwale with
eager troops, glided past them towards the coast; and after a brief
interval a flotilla of destroyers crept on their track, packed with more
men to be rushed ashore as soon as the covering parties had obtained a
footing.
At this stage happened one of the most daring of the many instances of
individual heroism with which the progress of the Gallipoli campaign has
been marked; a deed that was fittingly rewarded with the D.S.O. It had
been suggested that three boatloads of men should be sent ahead of the
rest to land and light a series of flares along the beach with the
two-fold object of enabling the invaders to get a glimpse of where they
were going, and of drawing the enemy's fire and so disclosing his
whereabouts for the benefit of the ships' gunners who were waiting to
begin the bombardment. Major Freyberg, a born New Zealander and in
command of the landing party at this point, had suggested to
Major-General Paris, his chief, that the men who went on such a
desperate mission would certainly be annihilated, and had offered to
swim ashore and light the flares himself; and Mr. Malcom Ross, who
accompanied the New Zealand forces as official war-correspondent, has
related the story of this plucky adventure in _The New Zealand Herald_.
A destroyer was to have dropped the major into the sea within half a
mile of the beach, but the distance was misjudged in the darkness, and
he found he had to do a swim of nearer two miles, "with three oil flares
and two Holmes lights which he carried in a waterproof bag, with
sufficient air to support the weight in the water. He also carried,
attached to a belt round his waist, a small revolver and a sheath
knife." He calculated that he was swimming for an hour and a half before
the sea shallowed and he could feel the earth under his feet, and as the
usual landing-place was powerfully protected with barbed-wire
entanglements, he had to grope his way along till he found an accessible
spot where he could emerge from the sea. He was threatened with cramp,
for the water was bitterly cold, but without loss of time he cautiously
made his way inland to a place where on the previous day, when he had
reconnoitred the coast in a destroyer, he had seen what he had taken to
be a line of trenches. When he arrived at them, a quarter of a mile from
the sea, he discovered that they were dummies, intended for the ships to
waste their shells on, "and he could hear the Turks talking and see them
striking matches to light their cigarettes in the lines higher up."
Crawling back to the beach, he lit his first flare, dived, and swam for
his life. Firing commenced immediately from the Turkish trenches, but
the major landed again safely farther along the beach, lit his second
flare, dived, and got away, and still farther along landed once more and
set his third blazing; then took to the water and was swimming for an
hour before the destroyer could find him and pick him up.
Meanwhile the destroyer, guided by the Turkish fire, had opened on the
enemy's trenches with her guns and maxims, and the warships farther out
were not slow to take a hand in the proceedings.
It was now towards five in the morning, and already the dawn was showing
a pale glimmer above the crests of the hills. The boats with their loads
of troops were nearing the shore, and squads of Turks could be dimly
seen scattering about the beach to intercept them. Their firing from
below and the fire of rifles and machine guns from the heights was
terribly effective, but, with their comrades falling dead or wounded
beside them, the men in the boats remained grimly, resolutely silent,
their coolness and steady discipline never for an instant shaken.
"The moment the boats touched land the Australians' turn had come," in
Sir Ian Hamilton's glowing words. "Like lightning they leaped ashore,
and each man as he did so went straight as his bayonet at the enemy. So
vigorous was the onslaught that the Turks made no attempt to withstand
it and fled from ridge to ridge, pursued by the Australian infantry.
"The attack was carried out by the 3rd Australian Brigade under Major
(temporary Colonel) Sinclair Maclagan, D.S.O. The 1st and 2nd Brigades
followed promptly, and were all disembarked by 2 p.m., by which time
12,000 men and two batteries of Indian Mountain Artillery had been
landed. The disembarkation of further artillery was delayed owing to the
fact that the enemy's heavy guns opened on the anchorage, and forced the
transports, which had been subjected to continuous shelling from the
field guns, to stand further out to sea."
All day the fighting continued with unflagging determination and
ferocity on both sides. The Turks had been cleared out of their first
trench in a flash, and the Australians and New Zealanders went swarming
up the steep, scrub-covered cliff to the trench that was devastating
them from above; they wasted no time in firing back, and troubled little
about taking cover; they just swung and scrambled up as swiftly and
straightly as was practicable, hurled themselves into that second
trench, and brawny giants among them were literally pitching the Turks
out on the points of their bayonets before the enemy had fully realised
what was happening to him and made haste to climb out unassisted and
bolt headlong up the cliff and over the ridge with the Australasians in
hot pursuit. Officers and men were mixed indiscriminately. Here would be
a small group, unofficered, holding an advanced ridge and triumphantly
hurling back the desperate counter-attack of a force of thrice their
numbers; here and there a solitary sniper, snugly ensconced behind a
boulder, putting in some useful work entirely on his own; and here again
would be a detachment of Australians, New Zealanders and Maoris,
flitting nimbly from cover to cover through the brushwood to dash
suddenly into the open with fearsome war-cries and drive the Turks from
some post where they had rallied farther inland.
To maintain anything like order in such an attack, over ground so broken
into hills and gullies, and so obscured with brushwood that you could
seldom see many yards before you, was impossible. Scattered groups, as
Sir Ian says, went on with such headlong valour that they pushed farther
across the Peninsula than had been intended, and, being unsupported,
were presently compelled to retire before the onrush of Turkish
reinforcements. But they fell back steadily; order was gradually evolved
out of the inevitable confusion; special detachments were sent to hold
critical stations, and soon the invaders were "solidified into a
semicircular position, with its right about a mile north of Gaba Tepe
and its left on the high ground over Fisherman's Hut."
All that day and all the next night the fighting continued with little
intermission. The Turks brought up reinforcements and, before our
positions could be strengthened, made a furious drive along the whole
line with 20,000 men. This lasted from eleven in the morning to three in
the afternoon, but was crushingly repulsed, the ships out in the Gulf
helping vigorously with their guns. It was succeeded by a second attack,
and, between five and six-thirty in the afternoon, by a third, both of
which failed completely and left the victors in full possession of all
the ground they had taken. In the night the Turks attacked again and
again with increasing fury, the Australian 3rd Battalion at one point
heroically repelling a deadly bayonet charge; but the morning of the
26th found our line everywhere unbroken. Our casualties had been very
heavy, but the enemy had suffered far more. They had punished us with
shrapnel, but many times when they had come surging forward in close
formation our machine guns had decimated their ranks, and in the light
of morning all the surrounding country was seen to be strewn with their
dead.
Throughout the 26th and 27th April the struggle was resumed
intermittently, day and night, but the enemy only shattered themselves
against the Australasian front as the sea shatters itself on a rock. By
now, our line had been securely entrenched, and arrangements completed
for systematically bringing ammunition, water, and supplies up the
difficult ground to the ridges; and on 28th-29th April the Australian
and New Zealand Army Corps was reinforced with four battalions of the
Royal Naval Division.
Gaba Tepe itself proved to be so strongly fortified and so amazingly
well protected with barbed-wire entanglements that the notion of
carrying it by storm had to be abandoned, but divers dominating posts
and observation stations were wrested from the Turks and added to our
possessions, and by degrees the warfare settled down to occasional
attacks by one side or the other and everlasting sniping. No longer
daring to press an attack home, the Turks devoted much of their energy
to persistent firing from caves and sheltering holes on the hill-sides,
to crawling out into the scrub and, lying low in the plentiful cover of
that uneven country, sniping the Australians and New Zealanders in their
shelter trenches. The New Zealanders, at one section of the line,
stalked a party of this kind very neatly, were on them before they could
escape and gave them a lesson with the bayonet that the few survivors
were not likely to forget in a hurry. When this lesson had been several
times repeated, at various points, the Turks took it generally to heart,
and did their sniping from a more respectful distance, or more
cunningly.
[Illustration: THE DARDANELLES–SOLDIERS TAKING THEIR HORSES FOR A BATHE.]
[Illustration: GENERAL BIRDWOOD, IN COMMAND OF THE AUSTRALIANS AT THE
DARDANELLES.]
One ingenious way of theirs was for a man to strip naked, paint himself
green and sit up in a convenient tree with a stock of provisions; and as
it was impossible to detect him among the leaves, and he only fired when
an incautious head appeared above the trenches, he would often have a
run of two or three days and do considerable damage before he could be
located and disposed of. Or he would tie umbrageous branches all about
his person and lie near-by in the open, looking like an innocent patch
of scrub, till somebody caught the flash of his gunfire or an incautious
movement betrayed him. The Australasians filled in a little time by
snaking forth to hunt for these pests, and frequently caught them
red-handed and shot them down, or caught them alive and brought them in
with all their greenery attached to them. More than once the snipers
proved to be women, who were more vicious and implacable even than the
men. All the while, on the other hand, the Australasians were doing a
great deal of thoroughly efficient sniping on their own account, for, as
Sir Ian bears witness, "the Turkish sniper is no match for the kangaroo
shooter, even at his own game."
This was the state of affairs on the 5th May, by which date the homeland
troops and the French, with a Naval Brigade formed of the Plymouth and
Deake battalions, and a Composite Division of the 2nd Australian and New
Zealand Infantry Brigades withdrawn from the section up north, above
Gaba Tepe, had established themselves impregnably right across the
southern point of the Peninsula to a depth of 5,000 yards from their
landing-places. There was sterner and more terrible work ahead of them,
down south as well as in the north. So far they had triumphed gloriously
over what seemed almost insuperable difficulties; they had won a footing
on the shores of Gallipoli at two places, and had made that footing
sure. There was still before them the more tremendous task of advancing
on those valleys and ridges of death and attacking the powerful network
of trenches that stretched in bewildering involutions from end to end of
the fifty miles of the Peninsula.
I am conscious that I have not done full justice to the unprecedented
story of this heroic landing; but nobody yet can describe it adequately,
for no one eye-witness can tell you more than of the events that
happened on the mile or so of ground where he was himself engaged, and
it is still too soon to gather all these stories into a clear and
detailed impression of the whole great event. Many who were in the thick
of it were too keenly absorbed in their own share of the action to take
notice of the doings of the men who were fighting around them. I met one
such, a wounded Australian, a few weeks ago, and tried to get from him
some account of what he had gone through, and here is as much as he
seemed to remember:
"Oh, I dunno," he said–a big, genial, reticent giant, with a bandage on
his right hand. "It was just hell, but I tell you I am glad I was there.
I wouldn't have missed it for a good deal. I was along with the covering
force in the first boats, and though there was hardly any light I reckon
there was enough for the Turks to see whereabouts we were. They kept
quiet till we were pretty well in, then they let us have it. Some of our
boys were hit, and it was too hot. So we dropped overboard and started
wading ashore. Then we found ourselves tripping into barbed wire which
they'd fixed under the water for us. We got it bad there. But we worried
through or round it somehow; I scarcely know how we managed it, but we
did. Not all of us. A lot of good chaps went under there, and it was
nasty to hear the shots plunking into the water close around you. As
soon as any of us got on to the beach we made for cover. There wasn't
too much of it. I went hands and knees over a span of open, and got
behind a jagged little line of rock. Several of our fellows were there
already, firing up at the beggars in their trenches on the side of the
hill, or the cliff, if you like to call it that. Away along the beach
there was some sharp firing; other boats had landed and there was a bit
of a scrap on, and we guessed by the cheering that our chaps were doing
all right. But directly I crawled in among the boys behind those rocks
and went to start firing, I found I couldn't use my hand. I hadn't felt
anything. I'd been carrying my gun in my left hand, and when I passed it
to the other it just slipped through as if the hand was numbed. Then I
found it was all wet and in a mess. I'd had a shot through it. I was
done. One of the others helped me to bandage it up and I lay down out of
the way. It began to be painful, and I believe I must have fainted a
bit. Things got muddled and there was a queer singing in my head, and I
woke up, so to speak, to find the R.A.M.C. boys taking care of me, and
my company was gone from behind the rocks and tearing away up the cliff
at the Turkeys' trenches. It was hard luck on me, but plenty of others
lying around had got it worse. They took me with a boatload of wounded
out to the hospital ship. They'd chipped a bit out of my leg here, too.
I didn't know that till afterwards–never felt it at the time. That's all
better again; and the hand's pretty well right now. They had to amputate
the little finger, but the rest's nearly all healed up and I reckon I
shall be able to go back to the front in another few weeks. Do I want to
go? I do that! I've still got plenty of hand to manage a gun, and I want
to pay some of them for that finger. I only saw the landing, and only a
little bit of that, but it beat everything in the fighting way that I
have ever read about. These people at home who are grousing now and
saying the job ought never to have been started, and that we ought to
slope out and leave it alone–what do they know about it? Most of them
have never seen the place, I guess, and none of them saw that fight. If
they had they might know that the boys who could do that landing can put
the whole thing bang through, if they'll shut up and back them up
properly with all the ammunition and reinforcements they will need."
A faith which is amply justified by Admiral de Robeck's reference to the
landing in his report on the operations. "At Gaba Tepe," he writes, "the
landing and the dash of the Australian Brigade for the cliffs was
magnificent; nothing could stop such men. The Australian and New Zealand
Army Corps in this, their first battle, set a standard as high as that
of any army in history, and one of which their countrymen have every
reason to be proud."
8
THE DARE-DEVIL ANZACS