THE STRAIN
In the second week of October, 1915, the Army at Cape Helles was
reinforced by dismounted Yeomanry from East and West Kent, Surrey and
Sussex, and by some Royal Fusilier Territorial units from Malta, who
were lent to the Royal Naval Division. Many West Kent officers and
N.C.O.'s were for a time attached to the Battalion, and proved admirable
comrades. The 42nd Division received some scanty drafts on the 23rd
October. These came from the 3rd line units at Codford on Salisbury
Plain, and were of excellent quality. Our draft was under Lieutenant
C.S. Wood, a very able signaller.
I noted on the 21st October that of the 300 men of the Battalion then in
the field, nearly 100 were on detached jobs--signallers, machine gunners
and details attached to various headquarters.
The result of the shrinkage in strength was a great strain upon the
survivors. "We never sleep," the Battalion's motto, was adopted
grudgingly as a rule of life. The necessities of the firing line
required vigilance by day and night, and the long frontages allotted to
the various units of the 42nd Division entailed broken nights and
laborious days for all. The men's physique became lowered. Septic sores
were general; bad eyes, not infrequent; jaundice of a type indicating
para-typhoid was common; amoebic dysentery very prevalent. Loss of
health meant loss of vigour. Limited to one bottle of water a day for
all purposes, and perpetually a prey to flies, heat, diarrhoea and
want of rest, the soldier had a trying time. Rations of a type welcome
in a northern climate were unpalatable in Turkey. In July and August we
were liberally supplied with vegetables and raisins, and with
much-prized golden syrup for our porridge; but the latter luxury then
disappeared, while for several months our only vegetables were onions,
which do not appeal to every palate. Jams, even when the pots were
adorned with pictures of one Sir Joseph Paxton, had very diminishing
attractions. The only strawberry jam we ever had on the Peninsula came
to us in tins, from which the labels had been stripped by some kindly
act of Providence. In the expedition's early days our men had been able
to exchange English jams for dainties procurable by the French and
Senegalese, but the monotonous and indefinable "plum and apple" of the
later summer killed the trade and extinguished all foreign admiration of
British jam-making. Only the flies were fascinated.
Our East Lancashire Territorials did all that was possible to relieve
the strain. We had a most able medical officer in Captain J.J. Hummel,
of Glasgow, who had temporarily succeeded Captain J.F. Farrow (our own
veteran M.O.) in July, but indeed all the units were happy in their
doctors, and _emetine_ in dysentery cases was a gift of gold. Nor could
a Brigade have had a more gallant and untiring padre than Captain E.T.
Kerby. He and Captain Farrow both won the Military Cross. Kerby must
have said the burial service over the graves of nearly a thousand
Manchesters on Gallipoli.
The food difficulty we met by encouraging unofficial imports. The
kindness of all at home was beyond praise. Consignments of comforts were
well regulated by Major H.G. Davies, who had charge of the Manchester
depot, but many came direct from innumerable friends and national and
local organisations. One mother of two boys of the Battalion who had
lost their lives wrote to me, while sending parcels for their surviving
comrades: "I dare say that life is dreary for them, poor lads. God in
His mercy has been so very merciful in that my Darlings have been spared
so much. My prayers will follow you throughout, praying for the success
of the whole of Our Battalion, and that you may all be spared to come
safely home to the fond hearts waiting."
England need never despair while she has such mothers.
The great glory of the East Lancashire Division during the long-drawn
days of October and November was, however, the temper of its men. The
spiritual exaltation, that all races feel at the outbreak of war and in
the hour of battle, disappears under the pressure of the daily grind.
Then, in his divine good-nature, the British Tommy comes into his own.
Nothing dims his cheerfulness and humour. A chorus starting with: "We
are the M.G." proclaimed the jollity of our Machine Gun Section and the
ingenuity of Sergeant W. Harrison. A Machine Gun Corps of the larger
type, organised under the energetic command of Captain Hayes, was a
thing of the future. A long list of singers and performers--Hartnett,
Mort, Addison (of ragtime celebrity), Wheelton, Holbrook, Hoyle,
Clavering, Shields--adorned the programmes of our concerts. Other men
like Tabbron and F.E.H. Barratt were notably cheery souls in the lines.
The handful of surviving officers--Higham, Chadwick, Whitley,
Douglas--with a few excellent attached officers--J. Baker and J.W.
Barrett of the Somersets, and F.W. Woodward of the Sherwood
Foresters--were untiring promoters of the men's well-being.
Their wants were so modest. Old magazines and football editions of
Saturday evening papers, published a month or two earlier in England,
sufficed for their literary appetites. Lancashire boys are not brought
up to read; the _Sentry_ writers were exceptional. When I once came upon
a man reading the _Golden Treasury_, in Hardship Avenue, I knew he could
not be a Manchester man. He was not. He came from the Isle of Man, and
had joined our reserves at Southport. I found about half-a-dozen men
who could enjoy _The Times_ broadsheets. I am afraid _John Bull_ was
much more popular.
It was pleasant indeed to stroll along the narrow trenches and see how
staunchly the men forgot their privations. Towards evening little
parties would go, heavy-laden, into long forward saps that the engineers
had thrown forward from Inniskilling Inch, to pass the night in cuttings
called "T-heads," which were ultimately to be connected together and
form a new trench closer to the enemy. They looked out from these lonely
places in the midst of No Man's Land upon scattered heaps of corpses,
and in their front upon the well-built Turkish trenches, substantially
wired in and full of cleverly disguised loopholes. Two sentries were
placed in each "T-head." The man on watch was exposed to oblique fire
from all directions, as both British and Turkish lines curved to right
and left, while the constant sound of Turkish picks at work suggested
the proximity of mines. The sap that ran back to the fire trench was
very narrow, and ended in a low tunnel under our parapet. It was
therefore hard to bring wounded in from the "T-head." I remember one
poor fellow in A Company called Renshaw being badly wounded in the head
one night, and being dragged back through the tunnel with infinite
difficulty.
The Turks were quick to pick up targets. One morning at our bivouac on
Geoghegan's Bluff, we noticed half-a-dozen mules stray from Gully Ravine
to the moor on the summit of its southerly side, perhaps a thousand
yards from the enemy's front line. We saw them shot, one by one, within
a minute. As the Turks enjoyed the possession of higher ground
everywhere from first to last, their power of observation was
necessarily greater than ours, and no corner of Cape Helles was exempt
from shell fire. It pursued us even in our bathing places.
The course of life on Gallipoli was, however, so monotonous that men
became callous to all dangers. They carried on the long day's routine
and the numberless little jobs included in the term "trench duties," as
if nothing else mattered. Such tasks are familiar to-day to so many
millions of Europeans that they need no description. Gas masks,
sprinklers and gongs were ready for use in every trench, but were
happily not needed.
Our men represented every Lancashire type, from the master builder to
the barrister's clerk, from the wheelwright to the calico printer, from
the railway carter to the commercial traveller. You would find together
in one traverse Sergeant J.V.H. Hogan, a well-read ex-Socialist devotee
of Union Chapel debates and old political opponent of my own, and
another sergeant, whose name I cannot now recall, but who had been the
petty officer of a South American liner sunk by the _Karlsruhe_ in the
early days of the War. Then we had famous footballers in Sergeants
Pearson and Bamber. The Territorial origin of the Battalion was, indeed,
a never-failing source of strength. Officers and men came from the same
place, enjoyed the same interests and possessed the same outlook. It
was pleasant to see in the trenches, faces familiar in my own suburb of
Fallowfield, and to chat with hundreds of men whose lives had touched
mine in days of peace.
The worth and capacity of these men were not peculiar to our unit, but
were common to the Manchester Brigade and the whole Division. One
battalion contained expert miners. Another battalion, at this time
commanded by Major (afterwards Lieutenant-Colonel) C.L. Worthington, had
lost enormously in their valiant battles. One of their captains--R.H.
Bedford--helped in our history lectures. Another battalion, under
Lieutenant-Colonel MacCarthy Morrogh, with Major H.C.F. Mandley as
Second in Command and Captain E. Horsfall as Adjutant, were our constant
neighbours and allies. With the Lancashire Fusiliers and East
Lancashires, and with the admirably run A.S.C. and R.A.M.C. we enjoyed a
slighter but no less hearty friendship.
The best relief from the long strain of the trenches was a bathe in the
sea, but any diversion while in rear of the firing line was
exhilarating. We used to gather on the moors that lay between
Geoghegan's Bluff and Bruce's Ravine, Turkish cartridge boxes made by
the Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken at Karlsruhe and labelled with
inscriptions in German and Turkish, innumerable spent Turkish
cartridges, abandoned Maeuser rifles, Turkish bandoliers (stamped with
the English name "Warner's") and all the usual fascinating debris of
battle.
[Illustration: C COMPANY, THE BRITISH CAMEL COMPANY, KHARTUM.]
On the 19th October I made a special expedition, with Captain C.E.
Higham, to the southern sector of the area, where the French had held
the line ever since their move from Kum Kale to the Peninsula. We walked
to beautiful Morto Bay, with its graceful curve from the headland called
De Tott's Battery. The ruins on this point, carried by the South Wales
Borderers on the 25th April, stood out clear-cut against the bright blue
of the Dardanelles and the fainter grey of the Asiatic coast beyond. We
went on past French and Senegalese dug-outs to Sedd-el-Bahr, a village
and fort wrecked by our naval guns in the first days of the campaign.
The country was open and dotted with the remains of vineyards. North of
Sedd-el-Bahr was the well-tended French graveyard, more prettily kept
than our own cemetery above Lancashire Landing. Here sleep many hundred
soldiers, "morts sur le champs d'honneur," their _kepis_ on the crosses,
and their graves adorned by flowers. The Jews and Senegalese had their
own separate plots.
Sedd-el-Bahr appeared to be but a collection of outer walls and broken
pillars, posts and fountains, some of archaic design. On the beach
below, the _River Clyde_ recalled the glory of the landing of the
Dublins, Hampshires and Munsters. We struggled back to our bivouac in
the teeth of a dusty, warm wind, to be inoculated with _emetine_ and to
rest by the white coast road, while we watched our monitors riding
between Cape Helles and Imbros, and landing shells in the Turkish
trenches on the slopes of Achi Baba. On such an occasion Ross Bain would
arrive from marketing among the Greeks on Tenedos with some greatly
valued potatoes, and then all our troubles would be forgotten.
When rain came, the joy of living was hard to attain. During all our
time on Gallipoli I remember but one or two occasions when we were
fortunate enough to secure timber or some corrugated iron to roof our
dug-outs. Normally we had only our mackintosh sheets. Rain turned the
thick dust to a brown morass, and the little mule carts struggling past
the swampy curve of Geoghegan's Bluff could hardly clamber up the Gully
Ravine. It was choked with mud.
Then the sun would come out and the flies returned in their myriads to
plague us. They blackened every jam-pot and clustered thickly round the
mouths and eyes of sleeping soldiers. The trenches became dry and dusty.
Detached legs or feet or arms of the dead would protrude from the
parapet, as the soil around them fell away. Smells became all-pervading.
We would seek refuge in the dug-outs, that looked out upon a crowded
graveyard from the sloping incline by Border Barricade. Then would come
the time for another inoculation with _emetine_, and we would join the
long line of men waiting, stripped to the waist, for Captain Hummel's
needle. We prayed that it might be effective, and that we should be
spared the curse of dysentery and long nights of misery in and about the
fly-infested latrines.