1915: The Death of Innocence Read online

  Sapphire to Amethyst: ‘No news at all!’

  All that the gunnery officers could see from the ships was the smoke of Turkish shells exploding along the line of the advance beyond the high escarpments. For fear of hitting their own troops scattered haphazardly behind them, they could do nothing to help them.

  Capt. H. Kenyon.

  Presently I started off to see what information I could get, but got held up by a big nullah so came back again. It was not a pleasant walk alone. When I got back to the Battery I found Chapman had been wounded so I went to him, helped with the bandaging, and started him off down the hill. Then the Colonel called me and said ammunition was running short, and not coming up quick enough, so I was to go down and get it along. I went down considerably quicker than I came up! I found Rossiter running the ammunition but as he did not know the situation I took it on and hustled it up as fast as it came along. I found the beach packed with wounded, and they were coming down in a steady stream. Chapman arrived when I was there looking jolly bad. All his colour had gone and he could hardly talk. I sat with him while he was being dressed by the doctor and tried to cheer him up, and then saw him carried off to the boat.

  I then remembered I was hungry so sat on the beach with General Lotbiniere and some other fellows, took off my belt and revolver and electric lamp and had some lunch. In the middle of it a shell burst all among us, so we bolted back under the bank.

  It looked then as if there could hardly be a whole man left in the force, and crowds of the men who came back told all sorts of tales from which one gathered matters were pretty serious.

  Serious though the position was at Anzac things might have been worse still had it not been for the feint attack at Bulair the previous evening. Men of the Royal Naval Division had embarked in small boats and rowed towards the shore just before dusk while there was still enough light for the Turkish observers to spot them. After dark they had rowed back again to the big ships and later under cover of the darkness Lieutenant Freyberg had volunteered to swim from a small boat a mile off shore to light flares along the beach. It was a feat worthy of Leander himself, and it rightly won him the Victoria Cross for it did more than anything else to convince the German Commander of the Turkish forces that the main force of the invasion would strike here. Even though there was no sign of them in the morning except for the ominous sight of British battleships standing off the coast, even though there were reports of landings at six other places a good day’s march away, Liman von Sanders was so convinced that they must be feints intended to mislead him that he kept the bulk of his manpower standing by all day at Bulair. It was well after nightfall on 25 April before he realised that he had been duped and sent troops marching south to reinforce the far more thinly defended sectors of the peninsula where the landings had actually taken place. It was von Sanders’s first and only gaffe of the campaign, and it was that little bit of luck, in a day of endless setbacks, that gave the allied troops the chance to dig in and consolidate their hold on the peninsula.

  But it was only a toe-hold. And the sea was at their backs.

  Chapter 25

  Three weeks and one day after the rail crash that wiped out half the battalion, the two remaining companies of the 7th Royal Scots landed on the shores of Gallipoli. For some of them, and particularly for the Commanding Officer, the voyage to the Mediterranean had hardly been a rest cure. The signal section had been wiped out at Gretna, so Captain Wightman, no expert himself, took on the job of training a new one, and the men who volunteered to replace the dead signallers had spent long hours training, swotting up morse code, practising semaphore on deck, and attempting to master the art of flashing by signal lamp. They were still far from expert, but they would have to do. The machine-gunners had gone too and Alex Elliott, co-opted as machine-gun officer in place of Lieutenant Christian Salveson who died in the Gretna crash, had spent every waking hour training new machine-gunners as best he could in the confines of a ship at sea and, he fervently hoped, keeping one step ahead of them, poring over instruction manuals through night after wakeful night, doing his utmost to prepare for the day when his cursory knowledge would be put to the test.

  In the early hours of 13 June they came ashore at V beach at Cape Helles. It was Sunday morning, and it was five weeks and all but a few hours since the 29th Division had landed at the same spot on the first day of the Gallipoli campaign. The trawlers that brought the Royal Scots to the shore tied up alongside the River Clyde, a beat-up old collier grounded near the beach to act as a pier that would carry the troops across the deep water to dry land. At the landings five weeks ago the River Clyde had been a vital part of the plan, for the main thrust of the attack was to be launched at Cape Helles at the toe of the peninsula from the beaches that were code-named V, W and X, and it was vital that the largest possible number of troops should be landed in the shortest possible time. As at Anzac the spearhead of the covering force would be carried in strings of open boats, ships’ cutters or lifeboats, towed by trawlers or steam-driven hoppers to the shore, where the tows would turn about to return to the waiting transports to fetch the second wave. Each tow could carry perhaps three hundred men – but not nearly enough to ensure success in the first vital hour of the assault, and it was at V beach that the situation would be critical.

  V beach at the foot of a natural amphitheatre of gently sloping land looked deceptively innocent – a narrow strip of sand, perhaps three hundred yards long with low cliffs on the left, and a ruined fort above the village of Sedd-el-Bahr on the right, on the headland where the peninsula turned back towards the mouth of the Dardanelles. It was here that the River Clyde was to play a part not unlike the part played by the legendary wooden horse at the siege of Troy in Agamemnon’s war. The shabby old tub, sailing in towing a hopper and with three lighters in her wake, carried two thousand soldiers who were to storm the beach in the first vital stage of the attack. The plan was to ground the River Clyde close to the beach, the hopper moving ahead of her to act as floating bridge. As soon as it was in position beneath the prow the men would pour out through wide sally-ports newly cut in her sides, along broad gang-planks to a platform beneath her bows, on to the hopper and off again, splashing through shallow water to dry land to secure the beach and open the road to Krithia. The final objective for that first day’s fighting was Achi Baba. The Staff were by no means unduly optimistic in supposing that the doughty regular soldiers of the 29th Division would easily reach it.

  Because of the strong currents that dragged at the sea where the Aegean met the Dardanelles, the Royal Navy was fearful that the tows might lose direction and could only guarantee to land them safely by daylight. It was a perfect spring morning. As the flotilla set off for the shore just after six o’clock the peninsula still seemed to be slumbering under a pale cloudless sky. Lieutenant-Colonel Williams, of the General Headquarters Staff, had his eyes fixed on the quiet coastline ahead and he could hardly believe their good fortune. There was no sign of life. As the first Staff Officer ashore it was part of his job to make a record of events as they happened. Standing on the bridge of the River Clyde with a grandstand view of the tows as they bobbed towards the bay, he made hasty minute-by-minute jottings in his notebook.

  6.10 a.m. Within 1/2 mile of the shore. We are far ahead of the tows. No O.C. troops on board. It must cause a mix-up if we, 2nd line, arrive before the 1st line. With difficulty I get Unwin (Captain of the River Clyde) to swerve off and await the tows.

  6.22 a.m. Ran smoothly ashore without a tremor. No opposition. We shall land unopposed.

  But the Turks were holding their fire and in their trenches well hidden

  by folds in the rising ground they too were blessing their luck. They had stayed cool under the thundering of the thirty-minute bombardment by the battleships standing off on the horizon. It had not touched their trenches. It had not touched the barriers of wire that ran behind the beach. They had suffered no casualties, and they could ill have spared them for there were only two comp
anies to defend the beach. Their defences were rudimentary, but they had machine-guns commanding the beach from the high ground and cunningly placed to fire in enfilade from the old fort. Even so, it took nerve to wait, to watch the River Clyde steaming towards the shore and the armada of small boats drawing ever nearer. They waited until they were within yards of the beach. And then the machine-guns opened up. At that distance, with such a target, they could hardly miss. It was sickening carnage.

  From the bridge of the grounded River Clyde Colonel Williams watched appalled, and his hand shook as he scrawled:

  6.25 a.m. Tows within a few yards of shore. Hell burst loose on them. One boat drifting to north, all killed. Others almost equally helpless. Our hopper gone away.

  The men on board the River Clyde were standing at the open sally-ports ready to double up the gangways, but the hopper that should have run forward beneath the bows of the collier to form the floating bridge had swung broadside and was wallowing helpless in the water frothing in a lash of bullets streaming from the machine-gun in the fort. The lighters on the starboard side of the River Clyde were higher and less manoeuvrable than the tiny hopper and they had only been brought in as a failsafe to help to bridge the gap if the collier chanced to ground too far from the shallow water for the smaller vessel to do the job. In the hail of bullets, and with little time to spare, it was not easy to inch two lighters into position in front of the big ship’s bow, to connect them precariously with gang-planks, and even when this had been managed they still yawed and wavered treacherously in the current. It was the Captain himself, Commander Unwin, who dived into the sea to steer them towards the shore and drag them into position. An able seaman dived in after him to help and there the two men stood, up to their waists in water, pulling on a rope to hold the lighters steady so that the troops could disembark. Bullets from two machine-guns mounted on the bows of the River Clyde sprayed over their heads.* Apart from the rifles carried by the infantry they were the only weapons there were to answer the lethal fire and the rifles, in the circumstances, were useless. Not many soldiers survived to fire them.

  Few of them even reached the shore. They were shot down almost to a man as they ran down the gang-ways. In minutes the lighters were piled deep with dead and dying men and the water turned red with the blood of the wounded staggering off the gangways to sink and drown beneath the weight of their equipment. The handful of men who reached the beach dashed to the shelter of a low sandy bank and watched in horror as line after line of their comrades were struck down and the tows of open boats bobbed aimless and adrift on the water.

  Somehow, despite his own horror, Colonel Williams managed to carry on recording the calamity.

  6.35 a.m. Connection with shore very bad. Only single file possible and not one man in ten gets across. Lighters blocked with dead and wounded. Maxims in bows firing full blast, but nothing to be seen excepting a Maxim firing through a hole in the fort and a pom-pom near the sky-line on our left front.

  9.0 a.m. Very little directed fire against us on the ship, but fire immediately concentrates on any attempt to land. The Turks’ fire discipline is really wonderful. Fear we’ll not land today.

  When almost a thousand men had been lost attempting to disembark from the River Clyde, realising that no more could be done until nightfall they called a halt. It was nine o’clock in the morning and, as the sun climbed higher, conditions in the dark hold of the ship where nine hundred more men were waiting were already uncomfortably hot and cramped. For the moment they had been reprieved, but settling down restlessly in the stuffy gloom, lit only by a few hanging lamps hastily rigged up, they could hear the muffled sound of firing from the land, the spatter of machine-guns from the deck above, the thud of big guns firing from the Asiatic shore and the crump of shells exploding on the beach. They could only guess what was happening.

  Waiting on the deck of a small transport that had seen civilian service as a cross-channel steamer, Brigadier-General Napier waited impatiently for the return of the tows that would take him and the second wave of his 88th Brigade to the shore. They were a long time coming and some of them never arrived at all for, like the soldiers in the open boats, many of the sailors manning them had been killed within yards of dry land. The tow that did eventually arrive had landed some of its men but the boats were crowded with dead and wounded. It was several minutes before they were unloaded and the General with his Staff and the second wave of soldiers were able to clamber down to take their places. They sat down gingerly, for the seats were still wet and slippery with blood but in his frustration at the delay, assuming with some irritation that his tow had been used to transport all the casualties, Napier made no inquiry. It was not the sailors’ job to decide that a landing was hopeless or to volunteer any such opinion to a Senior Army Officer. Their job was to convey the Army to the shore and whatever their trepidation they did not intend to shirk it. Stoically, trailing the little boats behind them, they headed back to the beach and back into the maelstrom.

  On board the collier the Commanding Officer of the 2nd Hampshires had just seen one of his own companies wiped out in a vain attempt to land and watched incredulously as Napier’s tow neared the open beach. Snatching up a megaphone he called to it to come alongside and the naval officer in charge obediently changed course. But General Napier was on his mettle. From his position in the leading boat, just a foot or so above the surface of the water, he could see that the lighters were full of men and he poised himself to spring on board and lead them ashore. But the men were all dead. Carington-Smith bellowed from the River Clyde,’ You can’t possibly land!’ But Napier yelled back, ‘I’ll have a damned good try!’ And then the machine-guns started up. General Napier and his staff reached the hopper, but they could get no further. Soon their own bodies were lying dead among the rest.*

  When night fell many hours later, although the Turks continued to fire haphazardly, the troops in the River Clyde were at last able to land and with only a small number of casualties. Under cover of darkness a makeshift jetty was flung out to link the ship to the shore. It was built from the piled-up packs of dead men. Even by morning the water lapping the beach was still red with blood. Exactly two months earlier, on 26 February, after the bombardment of the fort at Sedd-el-Bahr, while the Royal Navy was engaged in its attempt to secure the Dardanelles, a party of Royal Marines had landed on this very beach and reconnoitred it unchallenged and at their leisure.

  V beach and some ground beyond it had long ago been secured, but the beaches were still in full view from the high ground and HMS Carron which brought the 7th Royal Scots from Lemnos prudently cruised just over the horizon until after dark. The tows of open boats were a thing of the past now, but in the dark and in a choppy sea it was not entirely easy to transfer the men and their brigade stores to the three trawlers that were to take them across the last few sea-miles to land on the peninsula. In the early hours of the morning the Royal Scots filed off the trawlers, up the gangways of the River Clyde alongside and on to the platform beneath her bows. Now it was linked to the beach by a proper jetty but, even so, it was hard work to man-handle the stores ashore and it was daylight before fatigue parties had finished stacking them on the beach.

  Compared to the bloody Sunday morning of 25 April, V beach was peaceful. The village of Sedd-el-Bahr was reduced to ruins, but the belts of wire had been cleared away. The rising ground was criss-crossed with new tracks, with freshly dug trenches, and there were sandbagged bivouacs burrowed into the slopes and dumps of supplies in the shelter of the cliffs and the old fort. During the night a procession of ration parties and pack-mules had come and gone laden with food and water and ammunition for the men in the line. A Red Cross flag flew above a cluster of tents and shelters near the beach and, not far from the dressing station, a crop of white crosses marked the graves of the soldiers who had died of their wounds.

  They were just a few of the casualties. In the five weeks since the landings, the small Gallipoli force had spent most of its s
trength. Two pushes towards Krithia had advanced them a mile or so up the peninsula but Krithia itself was still in Turkish hands, Achi Baba remained inviolable and the losses, by comparison with the strength of the force, had been staggering. For every hundred yards gained a thousand men were lost. Not all of them were killed or wounded in battle. Many were falling sick with dysentery. Conditions were worsening and although it was still early summer the heat was already trying and the men were plagued by flies that swarmed and thrived by the million in trenches and dug-outs, and preyed on the bodies of the dead lying unburied between the lines. The spring flowers that carpeted the peninsula in April had withered away and so had the sweet-scented blooms on the thorny scrub that was now so brittle and tinder-dry that it could be snapped off and used as firewood. The burst of a shell, even the scorch of a flying bullet, could set it alight. Everywhere the ground was arid and the nullahs and trenches were thick with dust that rose in clouds at every step, inflamed every eye, filled every nostril and rasped mercilessly at the back of every throat parched for lack of water. Later, as the summer drew on, it would be worse. Even now it was no picnic.

  Sgt. H. Keighley, 29th Div., Royal Artillery.

  The food was bully beef and biscuits with apple jam and cheese, and you had dried vegetables which had to be soaked overnight in the dixie to boil next day. It were like eating rubber! The potatoes were the same. The food was almost nil. If we did get any bread, which later on we did perhaps once a month, we got just one loaf between eight men for a day’s ration. We’d no fresh water. The water that we drank was brought by boat to W beach and water-carts collected it and brought it up so far. We were on the west side of Y ravine and it was a very high cliff. You had to climb a winding path to the top and we had to carry dixies full of water from water-carts up to this gun position.