GIVING UP GALLIPOLI
In looking over the notes and papers I have collected to aid me in the
preparation of this book, memory is vigorously stirred by a clipping
of an article from the Sydney _Mail_ of October 31, 1917, written by a
fellow officer who prefers to remain anonymous. He wrote well of the
familiar scenes of the famous battlefield as they would appear today.
Following is an extract:
“The ‘Vineyard’ has blossomed and the small green grapes cluster on the
vine. The well by the fisherman’s hut has run sweet once more. The cave
dwellers by Shrapnel Gully, Quinn’s Post and Courtenay’s are as quiet
and still as tombs. Grass and weeds have grown over the winding paths
that thread the valleys and scrape the hilltops. The sandbags of the
traverses have rotted and burst, spilling their earth on the litter of
these battles of yesterday. And out through the chessboard field the
grave-mounds of earth that we pattered down with spade and entrenching
tool have blossomed with wild flowers and green grass. The warm,
tideless Ægean washes these empty beaches where once thousands of men
from the Empire’s back-blocks made war as it had never been made before.
“Two years ago forty thousand men walked these paths. They slept in
these dug-outs, or in the trenches, and the detonation of the guns
of the warships shook loose the earth and sand above them so that it
rattled down in their faces, waking them from dreams of home to an
uncomfortable reality. Think of those three days two years ago! Think
of the waterless fight for Chocolate Hill; of the wounded lying in
the brushwood and waiting for the sweeping grass fires to reach their
resting place. Men lay there unable to move; some of them not able
to pull their water bottles from their web-slings! Think of them and
remember them, for in all wars there was never a more gallant forlorn
hope than this one.
“Lone Pine, Chocolate Hill, Sari Bair and Biyuk Anafarta were goals
set far ahead. Many reached them and never came back. Lone Pine was
attacked on August 6 and of all the attacks at Gallipoli, this was,
perhaps, the most terrible. The Turkish trenches were supplied with
head covers made of stout timber. Under these were loopholes from which
the Turks fired with temporary immunity at the advance Australian
battalions. The enfilade fire was terrible, but the men bodily lifted
the timber beams and dropped feet first into the dark trenches beneath.
By 5:47 P. M., 17 minutes after the first advance, we held the
trenches. At 1:30 the same night there came a terrific counter-attack
headed by scores of bombers. For seven hours the counter-attack
pressed, wave on wave of Turks coming from the very parapet often to
be shot and fall into the trench. One Australian brigade, only two
thousand strong, carried this work in the face of an entire enemy
division and held it during six days’ counter-attacks. A thousand
corpses were in the trench system after the occupation and to make room
for the fighting men these were stacked in piles at intervals between
the traverses.
“There was one example there that will never die. The 7th Gloucester
lost all their officers and senior non-commissioned officers, but
they fought on, mere isolated groups of men and the privates and
lance-corporal, green troops of the New Army from midday until sunset!
The Lancashires, the Hampshires, Gloucesters, Australians and New
Zealanders--all did men’s work in those days. None of their deeds will
die, none of the names of men or regiment will ever be forgotten.”
I was in the attack of Lone Pine which carried our armies nearest to
the goal of capturing the coveted strip between the Ægean and the
Straits of Dardanelles. I got my first wound of the war in the winning
of these timber-roofed trenches, a bayonet thrust in the darkness
ripping my right hand open but doing my hand in the matter of its
future usefulness no permanent injury.
Reinforcements had come to us till our numbers stood at forty thousand,
but with the reinforcements also came aëroplanes which later “spotted”
for us the information that the Turks on the tops of the ridges
outnumbered us by many thousands. They had also the support of the
great guns of their forts although our battle ships had made the
contests in artillery fairly even duels.
Lone Pine Hill was the most prominent ridge on our front. It was so
named because the sweep of our fire had leveled a small forest so
completely that only a single pine tree remained. Its foliage had been
entirely blown away. There was left of it but its broken trunk and two
gaunt limbs, blackened by explosions and upraised, curiously resembling
the arms of a soldier in the act of surrender. We took this to be a
good omen when on the afternoon of August 6th our orders came that on
this night we were to mount these 500 yards of rock, stubble and moss
and possess ourselves of this highest point of the enemy positions.
We felt all confident. With reinforcements of our own Anzacs had
come moreover big supplies of ammunition, machine guns and additional
artillery.
But also we knew the way ahead to be a hard one to travel and our
aëroplane observers in their reports and photographs had shown how
deeply and firmly the Turks under their German officers had fixed
themselves in the trenches on the summit of Lone Pine.
Nearly all the attacks up to this time had begun in the dawn. This
time the attack was ordered immediately on the fall of darkness. The
strategy succeeded. There is no doubt that a night advance was a big
surprise for we had made our way up along two hundred yards of ground
before they suspected our coming. Then they flashed their star-shells
in the sky and swept us with a howling fire. It stopped us for a time,
but we pulled ourselves together and held on until our commanders were
certain that the Zion Mule Corps under Colonel Paterson, the famous
Jewish contingent in this action at Gallipoli, were behind us with
their sturdy animals heavily laden with the bombs that we already knew
to be so vital a weapon in trench-storming. They used the mules as well
to bring us additional machine guns. But most of all we needed a chance
to catch our breath. Our halt did not in the least mean our doubt of
ability to get those trenches. It was part of good wisdom that our men
should not attain the top of the ridge winded and exhausted from the
climb.
We halted crouching behind the rocks and knolls, gasping at first, for
only about five minutes. Then we started to cover the rest of the climb
and give the Turks and their German commanders “what for.”
The Turkish trenches, it must be understood, were built in the hillside
and their timber-roofs slanted toward us. These roofs were honeycombed
with loop-holes from which their fire snarled at us as we came. Its
first effect was deadly, but there was no wavering. Against the geysers
of bullets these covered trenches were throwing up we simply went to
work with our trench knives and bayonets, used them as crowbars and
ripped the timbers loose. We blew the timbers into the air as well
with bombs although many of our men were disabled, being wounded by
big flying splinters in the process. We dropped right in on top of
the Turks and fought them hand to hand in their own dug-outs. It was
fast fighting and we swiftly overwhelmed them. I recall to the reader
as accurate the statement of the writer in the Sydney _Mail_ that we
captured Lone Pine Ridge in seventeen minutes of direct attack.
The Turks fell completely away from Lone Pine Ridge and retreated fully
a mile across a shallow valley and on to another ridge where we knew
from our aëroplane scouts they had another strong position. In the
judgment of our commanders we must be content to hold the elevation,
the next advance, if it were to be undertaken, would have to be with
the aid of tremendous artillery force in the taking of the great
Dardenelles forts themselves.
From 6 o’clock in the evening of August 6th until half-past one the
following morning you might have supposed that the Turkish soldier was
a phantom for all we ever saw of him. But the batteries of the big
forts never let up. For six weeks they were to hold us under a fire
night and day. It wasn’t exactly continuous, but you never could tell
when it would open up and never a day or night passed that did not find
us under attack.
At half-past one o’clock in the morning of August 7th the Turks
came back, seeking to regain the Lone Pine position. They fought us
fiercely. They stormed their way against terrific machine-gun fire
to the very brink of our trenches. Sometimes they got into the very
trenches themselves and our men found them hard fighters in hand to
hand struggles and, not like the Germans as we were to discover later,
cowards under the rip and stab of cold steel.
They were tireless in attack. We sent back waves of them, but other
waves came on. They, too, had their battle songs, or I should say song.
It was always the same tune they sang in swooping at us, a curious
whining refrain that would suddenly end in a high note of ferocity or
anticipated triumph.
There was a man at the end of the trench that we had taken who did
not belong to my battalion, but who had jumped into the trench
suddenly with a whole box of bombs in his arms and who before he got
finished with that night’s work had won the Victoria Cross. I saw him
in the thick of a fight passing out bombs with splendid strength and
swiftness. Besides as I kept watching him he was tireless. He stopped
rush after rush of battle-mad Turks as they tried to force their way
into our dug-outs. Noting his effectiveness, I gave orders to keep him
well supplied with bombs. I ordered two men behind him for relief, but
he kept constantly shouting back that he was feeling fine and able to
carry on. In the morning that particular fight was over and around the
section of the trench where this man fought we counted forty-seven
Turkish dead. He wasn’t scratched. My memory is playing me badly at
the moment and I can’t give his name. He was, however, sufficiently
recognized in the official dispatches which in naming him identified
him as a famous cricket player of Australia. His bowling arm had
certainly done noble work that night. Without the tireless stream of
bombs we kept in the air at the enemy I am not sure that we could have
held on to our particular section of the trench.
Official dispatches have told how we hung on to these advanced trenches
from August until October, how the Turk was kept in subjection in so
far as the territory we had so vigorously acquired. We settled down
in the sandstone hills and grimly endured through these months an
intolerably monotonous life.
We almost welcomed the blizzard that struck us in the latter part of
October because of the change it gave us, that is to say, we welcomed
it the first day when the snow covered the ridges and thousands of
British soldiers turned into rollicking boys. We snowballed each
other, we mixed our jam with the clean white snow, called it sherbet
and gobbled it, improvised skis out of the bottoms of barrels and shot
over the ridges like human darts, built snow Germans and snow Turks
and knocked them over and one company created the greatest attraction
by building a big snow Kaiser which we bayoneted to pieces with great
shouts of laughter.
But we had to pay for this fun in the succeeding weeks in which the
trenches remained frozen and the air bit into us cruelly. It was a big
change from the blazing heat of the summer climate on the peninsula to
the arctic weather that swept so suddenly down. And many new crosses
were erected in the hillside cemeteries over the graves of men who
died of pneumonia. Thousands were tortured by pneumonia and the minor
infliction of frost-bite.
Long ago water had become too precious a thing to be used for shaving
and our men had become as whiskery as the Turks. One fellow one morning
looking through his trench periscope caught a reflection of himself in
its mirror. He had grown a foot and one-half of black whiskers, but
hadn’t realized the change it would make in his appearance. So he let a
yell out of him to give us the alarm that the Turks were at our trench.
But his own magnificent growth of black whiskers had deceived him.
We lived so long in these trenches that were so much like rabbit
warrens that we had got to calling ourselves rabbits and one
disconsolate man of mine that I found sitting in the trench one day
and asked of him what might be the cause of his deep dejection answered:
“I am waiting for my ears to get longer and my tail to sprout.”
I come now to a day in November, to be exact the 25th. This was to be
a historic event for us Anzacs and will doubtless rank as a historic
event of the war. It was the visit of Lord Kitchener to Anzac as we now
call the two miles of Gallipoli strip we held. I am not in a position
to make the statement authoritatively, but I think his coming was a
complete surprise to the commandants. It certainly was to the rank and
file. He arrived on a man-o’-warsman. Of course, great honors were
paid him. The Turks were no longer active and the commanders had no
hesitation in assembling fully ten thousand men on the beach to stand
in review before the great leader. I was fortunately among them. I had,
when in service in India (1906-1911), been a participant in the famous
Kitchener maneuvers.
I naturally looked at him searchingly to note what changes might have
been wrought by the war and its responsibilities. He did look older
as he stood before us--much older. He was a little stooped, but in
the stride of his long lean figure he was as vigorous as I had ever
seen him. And his eyes were keen and full of light and strength as he
stood before us. It wasn’t until days later that positive orders came
when we learned officially that Gallipoli was to be evacuated. But he
practically told us that fact that day. For a brief talk to the army
followed his visit and inspection of three hours of the front trenches,
his own observations with glasses from certain places of vantage, a
submission to his consideration of all the aëro-photographs that had
been taken of the Turkish positions and strength and a long conference
with the supreme commandant of the period, Sir Charles Monro.
I will try to repeat Lord Kitchener’s words to us as literally, as
accurately as memory will serve. He said:
“The King and your country appreciate most deeply the great work you
have done. To have effected a landing on this hostile shore and to
have held it as splendidly as you have done is in itself a great
triumph for British arms. I regret that the necessities of our armies,
in conformation to other plans drawn, may not permit you to remain to
complete this noble success.”
And so Kitchener left us. His visit was not longer than twenty-four
hours--in fact, the man-o’-warsman that brought him into Anzac Cove
slipped away in the darkness, sometime before dawn.
But from that day we knew that all the perils and hardships we had
endured in the fight for Gallipoli were to be crossed out in the
record of results of the war. There began from November 26th a silent,
secretive movement to effect our evacuation.
It must go down in history that this was most subtly done. If the
Turks had ever suspected that we were thinking of withdrawing, they
might have in the last two weeks of the evacuation, at least, swooped
down and slaughtered the third of the force which was actually left
on the Gallipoli strip. We used countless schemes of deception. To
be specific we would send away boat loads of a thousand men in the
night, but in the daylight land boat loads of a hundred to fool the
Turkish observers into believing we were landing new forces. In the
same way we would transport thousands of boxes of bombs and cartridges
out of the trenches and the harbor in the night to the battle ships
and in the daylight land from our barges, steamboats, pinnaces and
launches, thousands and thousands of empty boxes that had contained the
ammunition.
As we also withdrew our effects from the front-line trenches, our
engineers displayed the greatest activity in making of all these
trenches and barbed-wire entanglements the most ingenious of mechanical
man-traps. Any force of Turks which attempted to swoop down the ridges
against our slowly departing brigades would confront explosions of
mines wonderfully camouflaged along the goat paths that were the only
roads to have passed through the barbed-wire barriers and in and over
deserted trenches would have set ablaze other deadly outbursts of
explosions. We also had set cunningly placed rifles on our outposts
which would have been set off by any prowling Turkish scout, kill him
in all probability and at the same time give us an alarm.
We were not without our expressions of sentiment in abandoning
Gallipoli for which we had fought so hard. We went among the rocks
and heather and gathered wattle, otherwise known as memosa which is a
sort of holly whose berries are yellow. It is the winter flower of the
Gallipoli peninsula. We fashioned these into thousands of wreaths and
in the very last days of our departure placed them on the graves of our
dead.
And frankly we had no great resentment against the Turk. He had been
a hard fighter but always a fair one. He had always battled as man
against man. Somehow, his German officers had never been able to make
him, if they tried, the barbarous, underhand, contemptible fighter into
which I was soon to learn they could develop their own German soldier.
As a matter of fact, we left friendly signs behind. One placard read:
“Au revoir--Brother Turk. Hope to see you again.” Another placard read:
“To long Whiskers.”
One dug-out showed a placard announcing: “Anzac Villa--To Let for the
Season. Beautiful Sandy Beach all to Yourself. Splendid sea view. Home
comforts. Lots of pleasure and excitement.”
Since Gallipoli German propagandists, with an idea of humiliating
England in the world’s opinion, have spread reports that if the British
forces had held out a month longer we would have triumphed on the
peninsula--that the Turks were on the verge of surrender.
Such reports are childish in their palpable falsity. As a matter of
fact we were less than 40,000 men against 500,000. Against the great
guns of the Turkish fort we had only in like artillery the great
guns of our battle ships. And the battle ships were being menaced by
submarines. It is only for me to set down that the great Kitchener
going thoroughly over the situation forced the evacuation that was so
masterfully managed.