LAST WORDS ON GALLIPOLI
The last I saw of the trenches was the tangled line on Fusilier Bluff.
The last I saw of Gallipoli was the fading contour of its cliffs as we
sailed in the _Delta_ for Mudros and Alexandria. When we touched at
Mudros we heard the first whisper of Lord Kitchener's fateful visit to
the Eastern Mediterranean.
All questions relating to the initiation and conduct of the expedition
are fitly left to the judgment of the Dardanelles Commission. Here have
only been expressed ideas that occurred to a Regimental Officer, whose
range of vision is always restricted, and whose generalisations are
inevitably based on a narrow, personal experience. Yet such ideas may
still have a bearing upon the history of the campaign, as the whole
theatre of operations at Cape Helles was extraordinarily congested. In a
tiny area, barely three miles by four, strategy had no elbow-room when
once the Army was committed to the plan of operations that had been
adopted. The war with the Turks on the Peninsula became purely a war of
tactics. If Inkermann was "the soldier's battle," Gallipoli was the
soldier's campaign.
It is easy to criticise in the light of a later standard. Gallipoli was
invaded early in 1915, not in 1916 or 1917, when the whole technique of
assault had been revolutionised. We landed with the methods practised in
England since the Boer War, methods as out of date in France in 1917 as
Wellington's methods were in 1815. On later knowledge no one can doubt
that a vast concentration of gun power, infinitely equipped and
munitioned, a scientific use of barrage fire, nicely adjusted to the
movements of a great infantry force, itself organised to develop the
fullest use of machine guns, Lewis guns, and grenades, would have broken
the defences of Achi Baba. Our Army knew none of these advantages. The
artillery was inadequate and was inadequately supplied with high
explosives to prepare for an attack in the style afterwards perfected on
the Western Front. It was realised nowhere at this period that the role
of infantry in attack is quite secondary to that of the guns. The
bombardment that preceded the infantry assaults at Cape Helles in August
did not last over two hours, and certainly never hit the trenches
actually in front of the Manchester Territorial Brigade. The gunners
could do no more than they did. The resources at their disposal were
quite insufficient to atone for the Army's difficulties in point of
numbers and in point of ground. It would appear as if we enjoyed no real
ascendancy over the enemy either in aircraft or mining. Bombing was most
unfamiliar to us on arrival. It appeals to the English sportsman
greatly and came to be brilliantly practised, but it was rarely a
determining element. The Battalion bombers on Gallipoli were officially
known as Grenadiers. Steel hats were, of course, unknown. They would
have saved many lives. Visual signalling, on which pains had been
lavished during training, proved of little use. The telephone, however,
was a godsend, and in our Battalion was admirably worked by Sergeant
Stanton.
The one handicap that was above all others a constant and pervading
thought in the minds of our men was the shortage in numbers. It was a
common belief that more reinforcements would have carried the great
advances of June and July over every obstacle. Our drafts were always
too small and too few, and the want of men infinitely aggravated the
exhaustion of the survivors. With but a part of its old strength, and
with no supports whatever between itself and the beaches, a battalion
was still expected to hold the same length of line as when it was up to
strength. Some two hundred men, for instance, occupied the long stretch
of trenches from Skinner's Lane corner to the eastern bird-cage and its
numerous forward saps, upon which men had once been employed. The task
involved weeks of scanty and broken sleep, and caused our support and
reserve lines to be utterly untenanted. Fatigue work was necessary the
very hour that a unit had straggled down to a bivouac from the fire
trenches. So precious was man power that the doctors were forced to
keep unfit men at duty until they dropped. It is impossible to imagine
men more worn by sleeplessness and sickness than the jaded Manchester
Territorials at the end of a fortnight in the front line. On a moving
day Gully Ravine was littered with men who had fallen out of the ranks
of a dozen regiments as they trudged, heavily laden, along the winding
and dust-swept track.
Sir Ian Hamilton wrote of our men early in August: "The ---- Manchesters
are a really good Battalion. Indeed, the whole of that Brigade have
proved themselves equal to veteran Regulars. The great misfortune has
been that there are no drafts ready to fill them up quickly. Had they
been at once filled up, as is the case in France, they would be finer
than ever. As it is, I fear lest the remnants may form too narrow a
basis for proper reconstruction when ultimately the drafts do make their
appearance."
The drafts we received on Gallipoli were the cream of the 2nd and 3rd
reserve lines, which had been organised at home under Colonels Pollitt
and Hawkins. They gave up their ease and often their ranks in order to
serve England better, but their numbers were small. The work of
reconstruction, to which Sir Ian Hamilton looked forward, came
afterwards in Egypt.
Sometimes the infantryman wondered whether, even if the essential
reinforcements arrived, they would ensure victory. On this point it is
difficult to judge. The home Government had committed itself to the
project of an offensive on the Western Front in the autumn of 1915, in
spite of the huge obstacles that confronted the Allies in that theatre
of war. The tactics of the period did not even organise trench raids.
The memory that dominates all recollections of Gallipoli is that of the
grandeur of the British soldier. Though he took no part in the miracle
of the landings, the East Lancashire Territorial proved himself worthy
of comradeship with even "the incomparable 29th Division." He ranked
with the Anzac and the Lowland Scot in the great adventure. The original
1st-line of our Battalion were really destroyed in Turkey with their
comrades of the same Brigade, but their gallantry in the early assaults
and their inflexible fortitude in the trenches--pestered by flies,
enfeebled by dysentery, stinted of water, and worn out by hardships--are
a lasting title to honour.
Their story, as told in the pages of the _Sentry_, was read by General
Wingate a few months later "with mixed feelings of joy and
sorrow--sorrow for the many good friends who have laid down their lives
for their King and Country, and joy that it has fallen to the lot of the
gallant Battalion, of which I have the honour to be Colonel, to have
behaved so gloriously in one of the hardest and most deadly campaigns in
which British troops have ever been engaged."
It is a source of pride to have known and lived with such men.