1915: The Death of Innocence Read online

  Cpl. G. Gilbert, A Sqn., 13th Light Horse.

  We had no horses at Anzac. We were serving as infantry and we were all crawling with lice, thirsty, hungry and completely browned off. One of our Generals came up to inspect us in our trenches in front of Lone Pine, and he was a fatherly sort, always used to ask the blokes about their family and stuff like that. He spoke to all the troops and he said to one soldier on the firing step, ‘Don’t forget to write home. How is your father?’ The bloke answered, ‘He’s dead.’ A bit later the General coming back along the trench asked the same question to same soldier, ‘And how is your father?’ And the bloke said, ‘He’s still dead, the lucky bugger.’ We all laughed. I don’t know what the General thought! But the tale went the rounds.

  Col. G. Beith, 24th Bn., AIF.

  I went down to one of my boys, I said, ‘How are you getting on, son?’ He said, ‘I’m not too bad, I’ll tell you what, if I could get out of this bloody place I’d volunteer to scrub out the Melbourne exhibition building with a tooth brush!’

  Cpl. G. Gilbert.

  My best mate and I used to go on the firing step together in Lone Pine. One morning moving into Lone Pine trenches one soldier just ahead of me turned to my mate and said, ‘Come on, Dick, you and I will go on together this time.’ One used the

  periscope to see what Johnny Turk was doing, the other was ready for any quick sniping at anything that moved (the trenches of the Turks were only thirty or forty yards away and in some places closer). The rest of us waited in an old dug-out, to take our turn. The next minute, bang, Dick got a bullet right through his head, and he fell at our feet. He made no sound at all! He was still alive when the stretcher-bearers took him down to the beach to be put on a hospital ship for Malta. But he died there. We think an enemy sniper must have been just out in front using slight ground cover waiting for our relief guard to come in. I made sure I got that sniper later on.

  In these high lands where the Anzacs were perched among rough outcrops separated by sheer drops and steep ravines there was no continuous trench-line, only rudimentary support-lines, and few conventional communication trenches. But the outcrops had been ringed and fortified with short lengths of trench, sometimes tunnelled underground and pierced with loopholes to command the Turkish lines. They called them ‘posts’, and the Anzacs clung to them like limpets.

  Pte. N. Scott, 6th (Victoria) Bn., 2nd Brig., 1st Australian Div.

  I’ll try to describe a fortnight my battalion spent in a place in the firing line known as Steel’s Post. To draw it mildly, I might state that at Steel’s Post we were in a hell on earth, with all the most fiendish appliances of man thrown in just to spur things on a bit. I had charge of a post of ten men in a position some forty yards in front of the firing line. This position was a maze of underground passages and the fire-trench was also in the form of a tunnel, with ten loopholes looking down the side of a gradual slope towards the Turks. This post was the extreme left of the Australian position and the New Zealanders were on my left. Well the NZs sapped forward and placed a 12-pound mountain gun right alongside our post. This gun fired only ten shots when Mr Turk spotted its position. Then things began to move! For a solid hour the Turks shelled it with every kind of gun they had but not one of those shells even touched the gun. My post got the blooming lot! Sixty-four shells dropped into my twelve yards of trench in one hour. They knocked all the tunnel work in, smashed our firing line to atoms and still were not satisfied. I received orders to move out all my men except one.

  Well, the two of us dodged shells for another hour. One shell burst within four feet of where we were standing and how the Dickens the splinters missed us, I can’t make out. It was a nice big 8-inch shell and it buried us where we stood, right up to our necks. The sensation of being buried by a big shell is terrible. (I know that all the faces of my friends and relations seemed to crowd before me, and I remembered every bad deed of my life in a flash. That’s the time you wish you had been a saint all your life!) Well they got me out and told me I was lucky! Lucky mind you!

  Before the end of the fortnight I’d managed to get buried three times. One shell didn’t bury me, but it simply bashed me up against the side of the trench as though I was a blooming sandbag. I just sagged forward, crumpled up and forgot everything. To give you some idea of what an ordinary 6-inch Howitzer shell can do, I saw a machine-gun smashed to atoms by one, and the crew of a corporal and five men wiped clean off the face of the earth. They were picked up in pieces and carried out in their blankets. That was on just an ordinary ‘quiet’ day at Steel’s Post. We heard later that before we went in Steel’s Post had been comparatively quiet, and the Turks must have just opened up all of a sudden. At the end of that fortnight of bashing, tearing, relentless shelling, we were all nerves, every one of us. The stuffing was knocked clean out of us. Steel’s went back to its normal state when we left. It was just like the luck of the poor old 6th. We seemed to walk straight into all the music.

  Pte. W. Carrol.

  We were right against the Turks. You could touch a Turk on the head the trenches were that close at Courtney’s Post. That was the first place I was put on, Courtney’s Post. The Turks were good soldiers, you couldn’t deny that. He’s always been a good soldier, right from the Crusaders and Saracens. But the Turks were quite good types. Oh, you don’t tell me! He’s no harm. Sometimes we’d be talking to each other and we’d say, ‘Got any weed?’ Sometimes we ran out of tobacco and when you were a smoker and had the feeling to smoke it drove you mad. The Turks said, ‘Oh, we’ve tons of tobacco. Have you got any meat?’ They’d got no meat. You could hear the fowls crowing at the back of their trenches. There were no chickens on our side but we had a barter with bags of Turkish tobacco for our bully beef. That’s how the war goes on. But it wouldn’t do to be getting too friendly with those men, because you might give them the idea that they could do what they liked and break through. You want to let them know they’re not welcome in our lines. We put barbed wire all the way along at night time along our trenches, and when we woke up in the morning they’d trained grappling hooks and they’d pulled all our barbed wire over in front of their trenches. All the trouble we went to put all our barbed wire all along and then the Turks grabbed it over in front of theirs and they thought that was a good joke! They were laughing and waving their shovels.

  But the Turks were ferocious soldiers and they were prepared to give no quarter, for they were not only fighting in defence of their homeland, they were fighting a jihad – a holy war against the infidel – and they were filled with holy zeal. ‘Allah, Allah, Allah? they shouted as they plunged forward to attack. During their training the Anzacs, like the British, had also been urged to yell to encourage offensive spirit as they bayoneted the swinging sandbags which then represented the enemy. Now, when they were charging flesh and blood Turks, the New Zealanders dashed into a fight with a war cry shouting the words they had picked up from Egyptian vendors of hard-boiled eggs who shouted their wares round the training camp. ‘Eggs is cooked!’ they bellowed. The imprecations that spurred the Aussies on to victory varied, but their favourite expression occurred so frequently that, according to interpreters who interrogated the prisoners, the Turks who invoked Allah as they charged genuinely believed that ‘Bloody bastard!’ was an invocation to the God of the Australians. Or so ran the tale, and although it might well have been a furphy, it amused the Aussies no end.

  ‘Oh my, I don’t want to die,’ sang the British soldiers in France, ‘I want to go home.’ The Turkish soldiers’ philosophy was much the same. Sometimes, in quiet periods, they could be heard singing in their lines:

  In Çanakkale there is a market with looking-glasses,

  Mama, I am going

  to meet the enemy,

  And I’m so young.

  In Çanakkale there is a cypress tree.

  Some of us are married,

  Some of us betrothed,

  And I am so young.

  In Çanakkale there is a pit
cher full of water.

  Mothers and fathers have lost

  All they hoped for,

  And I am so young.

  In Çanakkale they have shot me.

  They put me in a grave

  While I was still alive,

  And I am so young.

  Çanakkale was the name the Turks gave to the peninsula the British knew as Gallipoli. Within a few hours, when they had captured the rugged ridges beyond and scaled the heights of Chunuk Bair the Anzacs confidently expected that the Turks would be in full flight and that shortly afterwards the peninsula itself would fall.

  On the eve of the attack Divine Service was held for the men of the 1st Australian Brigade who wished to attend. The padre had some difficulty in finding a suitable spot close to the trenches and he hit eventually on a small hollow in Wire Gully near the lines in front of Lone Pine. It was lined with ammunition boxes for it had also been picked out as a suitable place in which to make a reserve dump of rifle ammunition, but there was room among them for the fifty or so men who filtered down from the line to take part. Returning with a carrying party from a laborious trek up from the beach, Sergeant Drummond of the 5th Battalion was astonished to find a service in full swing. ‘Hide me, Oh my Saviour, hide,’ they were singing, ‘‘til the storms of life are past…’ The sergeant did not mean to disrupt the service, but he had a job to do and it was impossible to do it quietly so the rest of the hymn and the prayers that followed were accompanied by the slither and thud of ammunition boxes sliding down a plank into the hollow. The padre, who was about to embark on his sermon, was not pleased and he shouted up to Drummond, ‘Are you aware that you are desecrating the first church in Gallipoli?’ ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Drummond called back, ‘but the ammo’s just as necessary for tomorrow as your sermon, isn’t it?’ The padre was a reasonable man. He smiled a little sadly. ‘Unfortunately, I suppose it is,’ he admitted.

  The ammunition was far from plentiful, but it had been garnered with care and now a good supply of shells was piled around gun positions, and rifle ammunition stacked behind the trenches in readiness for the battle. On the offshore islands the British troops were already embarking on the lighters that would carry them to Suvla Bay. At GHQ on Lemnos Sir Ian Hamilton, having made his dispositions, could only wait and hope, and possibly pray, for success in the morning. The King’s Messenger was on the point of departure and by the light of a hurricane lamp Sir Maurice Hankey hastily penned a postscript to the latest report he would carry to the Prime Minister. In the event of success rapid political decisions must be taken and Hankey had given this matter deep thought. Since formal peace negotiations with Turkey would take some weeks, a provisional armistice would have to be arranged in the immediate aftermath of a Turkish defeat, which, he suggested, should provide for ‘Disarmament of all the Turkish forces… The handing over of arms to the Allies… An Allied Garrison in Constantinople… Disarmament of the forts in the Dardanelles and Bosphorus.’ He offered to stay on to supervise the Armistice arrangements but, being a realistic man, he added, ‘Inthe alternative event of complete failure or partial success involving a further period of trench warfare, I shall come home as soon as I can. The position then will be rather grave.’

  But no one anticipated failure.

  Chapter 30

  The landing at Suvla Bay should have been easy. The bay was deep and it was wide – a long, curving coast of sandy beaches and a low plain reaching out to the Anafarta Hills more than two miles away. Nearer the shore were a few gentle hills, hardly high enough to be obstacles, and although there was one possible stumbling-block – a large salt lake that lay just behind the shoreline separated from the bay by a narrow spit of land – it was expected to be dry in summer and there seemed no reason to expect that it would present a problem.

  To the south, on the right of Suvla Bay, rose the Sari Bair Ridge – less of a ridge than a succession of razor-edged spurs and peaks, with deep cols and gorges covered in dense scrub. It was wild and untracked country, many times more forbidding than the heights of Anzac beyond it. For obvious reasons, the Sari Bair Ridge was almost undefended, but if it could be grasped at the same time as the landing, while the troops were rushing inland at Suvla Bay, the Turks would be outflanked and their positions at Anzac immediately to the south would rapidly become untenable. It would be a mammoth task, and the only chance of success depended on the element of surprise, for only a madman would imagine that it could possibly be approached by the wild unknown terrain where the western end of the ridge dropped to the sea. But this was the feat that the New Zealanders, backed by some unfortunate newly arrived battalions of Kitchener’s Army, were expected to attempt, marching by night across the cliff-top tracks and gullies to the foot of Sari Bair. Then they were to climb. The force was divided into three columns and it was estimated that by clambering up by different routes they would arrive simultaneously on top of the ridge well before dawn. After that, as they moved forward unseen to capture the height of Chunuk Bair, the worst would be over and by comparison mere fighting would be easy. From the summit of Chunuk Bair in the first light of day they would at last be in sight of the Dardanelles.

  The ‘big show’ opened on 6 August with two preliminary attacks.

  In the brassy heat of mid-afternoon the 42nd Division attacked at Helles and was cut to pieces by ferocious fire from the Turkish guns. They made little headway, but the Australians leapt forward at Anzac and, fighting as they had never fought before, succeeded in capturing Lone Pine. It was a considerable gain, for the trenches at Lone Pine were at the heart of the Turkish position, the strongest and most formidable of their line, and the Turks fought like demons to hold on. The Aussies held on too, and very soon, when news of the capture reached Turkish headquarters, reserves were sent scurrying away from Suvla, away from Helles, making for Anzac with all possible speed.

  But the Australians’ objective was not only to draw off enemy reserves. They were to attack other positions along the Anzac line and, as soon as the British troops had captured the ground at Suvla Bay and the New Zealanders were in possession of Chunuk Bair, they would push ahead, and drive deep into the Turkish defences. Together, and in no time at all, they would be standing triumphant by the waters of the Dardanelles. The fighting and bombing at Lone Pine went on all night, and the position was still precarious, but the Aussies had made a glorious start.

  It was a terrible night for the New Zealanders and their progress was cripplingly slow. The effort of climbing precipitous slopes, hacking a way through bush and undergrowth through narrow gorges, scrabbling up rocky heights and pinnacles, negotiating sheer drops, even keeping direction through trackless mountainous terrain, would have been a formidable challenge to skilled mountaineers travelling light and in daytime. But it was pitch dark and the troops were not travelling light. They had no mules, no carts, no means of transporting ammunition, picks and shovels for digging in, plus the vital supplies of food and water and medical supplies that must sustain them, perhaps for days, so in addition to his rifle and pack, each man was carrying a deadly weight. Depending on Greek guides who appeared to be trusting more to luck than to experience, many lost direction in the ‘short cuts’ they proposed and were forced to retrace their weary steps when some tortuous route came to an abrupt end in a cleft too narrow for even a single man to squeeze through. The climb would have taxed the strength of the fittest men. Debilitated as the New Zealanders were by heat and dysentery, it was a wonder that they made it at all.

  Not even the men of the Suvla landing force were in fine fettle. They were not yet acclimatised to the enervating heat and even on the offshore islands there was an epidemic of diarrhoea which soon spread to the new arrivals. To cap it all, on the day before the landing large numbers of them had been inoculated against cholera and their arms were stiff and sore as a result. Their Commander, General Sir Frederick Stopford, was also under the weather. The three newly arrived divisions destined for Suvla Bay had been formed into a single new Corps
and Sir Ian Hamilton had begged the War Office to supply an experienced senior officer to command it, even going so far as to suggest that General Byng or General Rawlinson would admirably fit the bill. But Byng and Rawlinson were serving in France and invaluable though the experience of either officer would be, Lord Kitchener dismissed out of hand the very idea that they could be spared for months – or even days – on end. And there was another point to be considered. In command of the 10th Division, part of the newly formed IX Corps, was one of the Army’s most senior generals and under no circumstances could Major-General Mahon be expected to take orders from a Corps Commander less senior than himself. It would be an unthinkable breach of etiquette and tradition and not for a moment could Kitchener contemplate such an outrageous idea. A senior man must be appointed, and that was that.

  The difficulty was that officers above the rank of Major-General were thin on the ground. Lieutenant-Generals were only one step below Field Marshals, the highest rank in the Army, and only Generals Ewart and Stopford were available for active service – and even they had only been brought out of comfortable retirement by the exigencies of war. The choice had fallen on Sir Frederick Stopford, and although weighed down with honours earned in more than four decades of distinguished service, mostly in staff or administrative posts, Stopford’s experience of soldiering in the field was negligible. He had never led troops into battle, he had never commanded so much as a battalion in an engagement, he was sixty-one years old, and his health was indifferent. But there was no one else. On the eve of the landing at Suvla Bay General Stopford was not a happy man. He had sprained his knee that morning and the Staff Officer sent by Sir Ian Hamilton to ensure that his instructions were understood was startled to find the General lying down in his tent and disturbed by his frankly expressed forebodings. The optimism with which Stopford had originally greeted the Suvla plan had evaporated in the days of waiting and reflection. He was worried in particular by the paucity of artillery support he could expect, for as it dashed inland, the IX Corps was to secure positions for its own guns which would only begin to land when they were consolidated, and although he was reminded that the guns of the warships would be covering the landings Stopford was not reassured. He dwelt on the fact that experience in France had shown that strong trench systems could only be attacked with the help of large numbers of Howitzers, and was doubtful of the assurance that on the evidence of reconnaissance aircraft no such systems existed, and although it was stressed and stressed again that everything depended on rapid advance to attain the inland heights before the Turks could bring in reinforcements, Stopford doubted that the prowess of the New Army men was up to securing the beach-head in the dark, let alone advancing to seize the first vital positions. Assured that the opposition could not possibly amount to more than five battalions. Stopford doubted the accuracy of the estimate. Finally he said, ‘Tell Sir Ian Hamilton that I am going to do my best, and that I hope to be successful. But he must realise that if the enemy proves to be holding a strong line of continuous entrenchments I shall be unable to dislodge him until more guns are landed.’ It was a bad beginning and, with hindsight, the outcome was inevitable.