THE VALLEY OF TORMENT
The loss of the crest of Sari Bair was the turning point in the fight
for the Dardanelles. The whole of the Turkish forces were thrown
into action at this point. The plan of attack had been designed so
that a portion at least of these defensive forces should be held
up by the advance of the troops which had landed at Suvla Bay. But
the advance of those troops was delayed, for reasons which do not
rightly come within the scope of this book, and therefore the bulk
of the defending forces could be concentrated in one desperate and
successful effort to drive back the invaders.
But the defenders paid dearly for their success. The slope up which
the New Zealanders had advanced with such painful effort, and over
which the victorious Turks were now pouring in dense masses, was
ranged by the Anzac artillery, by the guns of the warships and by the
Indian Mountain batteries. Their fire was all concentrated upon these
serried masses of the enemy, and great gaps were torn in their ranks
as they swept over the hill-top.
Even deadlier was the work of the New Zealand machine-gun section,
directed by the famous Major Wallingford, D.S.O. A whole book could
be written of the feats which the New Zealanders ascribe to this
remarkable soldier, "The human machine-gun" as they call him. His
quick eye for a tactical advantage had grasped the probability of
a rush of Turks over the crest of Sari Bair, and his ten guns were
posted to take the fullest advantage of the materialization of that
surmise.
In the slaughter that followed those ten guns consumed 16,000 rounds
of ammunition, and the claim made of 5,000 hits is probably a
conservative estimate. But our own losses had been very heavy. Of the
37,000 men under General Birdwood's command on August 6, 12,000 were
out of action on the evening of August 10. Of these quite one half
were New Zealanders. Gloriously had they fought. Their silent charges
in the dark will for ever remain as the high-water mark of restrained
courage and enterprise. Their wounded showed the same qualities of
silent endurance and devotion to their fellows.
The New Zealand wounded had an experience that is an epic of
suffering. Only the supreme fortitude with which it was endured
impels me to give some account of the days and nights spent by over
four hundred of these heroes in a place which they have christened
the Valley of Torment. It was placed on the rugged side of Sari Bair,
a deep depression in the hillside. On one side of it a mountain wall
rose in a perpendicular cliff that would have defied a mountain goat
to climb it. On the other rose the steep declivity of Rhododendron
Ridge. Below, the valley opened out upon a flat plateau, so swept
by the guns of both sides that no living thing could exist for one
moment upon its flat, clear surface.
The only way in and out of the valley was from above, where the New
Zealanders were fighting like possessed beings for the foothold
they had won on the crest of Sari Bair. And to this valley the
stretcher-bearers had carried the men who had fallen in the fight, a
sad little group of wounded men whose numbers were hourly increasing.
There, too, crawled those who were less severely injured. And there
the unwounded soldiers carried their stricken mates for shelter from
the hail of bullets, while the fight lasted.
As the wounded men came in, a devoted band of Red Cross men lent them
what aid they could. There was no doctor nearer than the dressing
station on the beach, but these Red Cross workers stayed their wounds
with bandages, tying tourniquets round limbs to check the flow of
arterial blood, and making tortured men as easy as circumstances
would permit.
The approach to this valley was so dangerous that no one might come
to it by daylight. There was no water there, until one man, less
severely wounded than some of his comrades, dug into a moist spot far
down the valley, and chanced on a spring that yielded a thin trickle
of brackish water.
By midday on August 8 there were three hundred wounded men in this
place of refuge, and more were continually arriving. They were
suffering from all the terrible manglings that exploding bombs and
high explosive shells can inflict. And in the Valley of Torment they
lay and endured. Some of them told their experiences, and sought to
cheer the rest by predicting a great victory as the result of the
attack in which they were taking part. Here and there a man could be
heard reciting verses to those who would listen.
No one moaned, and no one uttered a complaint. When a man too sorely
wounded died of his hurts, they expressed their thanks that he had
been spared further pain. The filling of the little spring was
eagerly awaited, so that each man could have his lips moistened with
a little brackish water. So there they lay and waited for the night,
which might bring them aid.
When night at last came, the weary stretcher-bearers tried to move
some of them over the ridge to a safe valley which lay on the other
side. A few were so moved, but these men had been working for days
and nights without rest or respite, and the task was beyond their
strength; for the steepness and roughness of that hillside is beyond
description. A message was sent down to the dressing station asking
for help, and a reply was sent in the early morning that it would be
forthcoming on the following night.
Through the night the parched men were tortured by the sight of water
being carried through the valley to the men in the firing line above
them. There was none of it for them, and they did not expect any; for
they knew the necessities of warfare, and recognized that at such a
time the combatant must come first.
The next day came with a hot sun, and clouds of flies. Also there
came many more wounded to the Valley of Torment, until the tale of
living men exceeded four hundred. And that day many died. Among those
who lived the torture from tourniquets that had been left too long on
wounded limbs became unendurable. Many of them will never recover the
free use of the limbs so tortured; others have already died from the
unavoidable mortification which resulted from this long delay.
Meanwhile, down at the dressing stations, the weary doctors were
struggling with hundreds of cases just as bad, and men seriously
wounded were waiting by scores for their turn for attention. These
are the necessary evils of war, accentuated at Gallipoli by the
very rough nature of the country in which the fighting took place,
and by the severity of the struggle and the importance of the issues
depending upon its outcome.
At last that day ended too, and evening fell with a cool breeze. The
exhausted men heard the stealthy approach of many men in the dark,
from the safe gully that lay beyond the range. And one of them, out
of thankfulness, began to sing the hymn--
At even, ere the sun was set,
The sick, O Lord, around Thee lay.
Nearly all of them took up the singing.
While they were still singing, there came over the ridge a large
number of soldiers, and put them all on stretchers. Then the
new-comers, some thousands in number, ranged themselves in two rows
facing one another. The double row of soldiers stretched up to the
crest of the ridge, and down the other side into the safe gully that
was there. And each stretcher was passed from hand to hand, up the
steep ridge and down the slope to the safety that lay on the other
side.
When all had been taken from the Valley of Torment, a long procession
of men with stretchers was formed, bearing the wounded down to the
sea. Two miles it stretched from start to finish, and it serpentined
slowly down the gully, each pair of bearers walking with slow care,
for the sake of the tortured man who was in their charge.
So the wounded men of New Zealand were carried out of the Valley
of Torment. One could fill whole volumes about the tender care of
the lightly wounded for their more grievously injured comrades, and
of the stoical indifference to pain and personal suffering shown
by these men. I have met many of the men who suffered there; and I
know that in their eyes the real tragedy of the experience is not
the torture they experienced. It is that, after all, their comrades
eventually had to forgo the advantage that had been won by so much
hardihood and loss of life.
Most handsomely, and for all time, has General Sir Ian Hamilton
proclaimed the fact that they were blameless of the final
catastrophe. His tribute concludes as follows:--
"The grand coup had not come off. The Narrows were still out of
sight and beyond field-gun range. But this was not the fault of
Lieutenant-General Birdwood or any of the officers and men under his
command. No mortal can command success; Lieutenant-General Birdwood
had done all that mortal man can do to deserve it. The way in which
he worked out his instructions into practical arrangements and
dispositions upon the terrain reflect high credit upon his military
capacity. I also wish to bring to your Lordship's notice the valuable
services of Major-General Godley, commanding the New Zealand and
Australian Division. He had under him at one time a force amounting
to two divisions, which he handled with conspicuous ability.
"As for the troops, the joyous alacrity with which they faced
danger, wounds and death, as if they were some new form of exciting
recreation, has astonished me--old campaigner as I am. I will say no
more, leaving Major-General Godley to speak for what happened under
his eyes:--'I cannot close my report,' he says, 'without placing
on record my unbounded admiration of the work performed, and the
gallantry displayed, by the troops and their leaders during the
severe fighting involved in these operations. Though the Australian,
New Zealand, and Indian units had been confined to trench duty in
a cramped space for some four months, and though the troops of the
New Armies had only just landed from a sea voyage, and many of them
had not been previously under fire, I do not believe that any troops
in the world could have accomplished more. All ranks vied with one
another in the performance of gallant deeds, and more than worthily
upheld the best traditions of the British Army.'
"Although the Sari Bair ridge was the key to the whole of my tactical
conception, and although the temptation to view this vital Anzac
battle at closer quarters was very hard to resist, there was nothing
in its course or conduct to call for my personal intervention."
THE GREAT NIGHT MARCH