Keyes then directed the captain of the Wear to get his torpedoes ready for action so that he could sink the helpless ship before she fell into the hands of the enemy; but first he wished to make quite certain that the water was too shallow for the Ocean to come in and take her in tow. The Wear then ran straight into the enemy fire to take soundings — she came so close to the shore that the Turkish gunners could be seen around their batteries, and at that point-blank range the flash of the guns and the arrival of the shells seemed to be simultaneous. The Wear, however, was not hit, and presently Keyes was able to signal to the Ocean that there were fifteen fathoms of water for half a mile inshore of the Irresistible; and he repeated de Robeck’s order that the ship should be taken in tow. To this he got no reply. Both the Ocean and the Swiftsure were now hotly engaged, and the Ocean in particular was steaming back and forth at great speed, blazing away with all her guns at the shore. It seemed to Keyes that she was doing no good whatever with all this activity and was needlessly exposing herself. For some time the heavy guns at the Narrows had been silent, but it was quite possible that they would open up again at any minute. He therefore signalled the Ocean once more: ‘If you do not propose to take the Irresistible in tow the Admiral wishes you to withdraw.’ With the Swiftsure Keyes could afford to be more peremptory — her captain was junior to him — and he ordered her to go at once. She was an old ship and much too lightly armoured to have undertaken the salvage in the present circumstances.
Meanwhile things had begun to improve with the Irresistible; she had lost her list and although she was down by the stern she was still no lower in the water than she had been an hour previously when the Wear first arrived. Keyes now decided to go full speed to de Robeck and suggest that trawlers might be brought back after dark to tow her into the current so that she would drift out through the straits. He was actually on his way and was drawing close to the Ocean so that he could repeat the order for her to withdraw when the next disaster occurred. A violent explosion shook the water and the Ocean took a heavy list. At the same time a shell hit her steering gear and she began to turn in circles instead of escaping down the straits. The destroyers which had been standing by for the last two hours raced in and took off her crew. Now the Turkish gunners had a second helpless target close at hand.
With this bad news Keyes returned to de Robeck in the Queen Elizabeth which was lying just outside the straits. The captains of both the Irresistible and the Ocean had already been taken off their ships and were with the Admiral when Keyes arrived. A sharp discussion ensued. Keyes said exactly what he thought about the loss of the Ocean and her failure to take the Irresistible in tow, and he asked for permission to go back and torpedo the Irresistible. The Ocean, he thought, might be salvaged. De Robeck agreed, and after a quick meal Keyes set off again in one of the Queen Elizabeth’s cutters. It was now dark and he was unable to find the Wear but fell in with the Jed instead, and in this destroyer he steamed back into the straits.
The scene in the Dardanelles now was extremely eerie. All was silent on either shore, and except for the Turkish searchlights that kept sweeping back and forth across the water there was no sign of life anywhere. For four hours the Jed cruised about hunting for the two lost battleships. She crept close in to the Asiatic shore, and with the aid of the enemy searchlights probed into every bay where the Irresistible and the Ocean might have gone aground. But there was nothing to be seen or heard: nothing but this extraordinary silence, the utter lassitude of the battlefield after the day’s fighting is done. To Keyes it was an exhilarating experience.
‘I had,’ he wrote later, ‘a most indelible impression that we were in the presence of a beaten foe. I thought he was beaten at 2 p.m. I knew he was beaten at 4 p.m. — and at midnight I knew with still greater certainty that he was absolutely beaten; and it only remained for us to organize a proper sweeping force and devise some means of dealing with the drifting mines to reap the fruits of our efforts. I felt that the guns of the forts and batteries and the concealed howitzers and mobile field guns were no longer a menace. Mines moored and drifting must, and could, be overcome.’
In the early hours of the morning Keyes, in this uplifted state of mind, steamed back to the Queen Elizabeth.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE attack on the Dardanelles could hardly have happened at a worse time for the Turks. In the five months that had elapsed since they had gone to war nothing had gone well with them. In the south Basra, at the head of the Persian Gulf, had fallen to the British, and the expedition into Egypt had ended in a miserable fiasco; a few exhausted and bewildered troops managed to reach the Suez Canal but they were easily driven off and not many of them got back to the oases of Palestine alive.
In the east things were even worse. It was Enver’s notion that Turkey should launch an offensive against Russia in the Caucasus with the Third Army stationed at Erzerum, and he decided to lead the expedition himself. Before leaving for the front he discussed his plan with Liman von Sanders, and the antagonism between the two men seems to have gathered impetus from this moment. Liman pointed out that Enver was proposing to take his troops across the mountains at Sarikamish in mid-winter, when the passes were blocked with snow, and that he had made no arrangements for his lines of supply. All this had no effect whatever upon Enver; he would proceed according to his plan, he said, and after the Russians had been defeated he would advance upon India through Afghanistan. Liman von Sanders has written a sober account of his experiences in Turkey, and he rarely permits himself an emotional expression. This last piece of information, however, undermined his calm. ‘Enver,’ he said, ‘gave utterance to fantastic ideas.’
The details of the battle of Sarikamish, on January 4, 1915, have never been fully known, for there was no one to record them and the news of what had happened was suppressed in Turkey at the time. The official figures, however, reveal that of the ninety thousand Turks who set out on the expedition only twelve thousand returned. The others were killed, captured, died of hunger or were frozen to death. Enver, a sad travesty of the Napoleon he so longed to emulate, abandoned what was left of the army in the field and came back through the winter snow across the Anatolian plain to resume his post at the Ministry of War in Constantinople. Outwardly he remained as calm as ever, and nothing was said about the disaster at Sarikamish or the subsequent outbreak of typhus in the broken army.
There followed in Constantinople a ludicrous attempt to proclaim a Jehad — a Holy War — against all Christians in the Near East (Germans and Austrians excepted), and German missions were sent as far off as Afghanistan to intrigue against the British. But nothing now could disguise the fact that Turkey’s war effort had come to a standstill. The Treasury was empty, the Army’s requisitions of private property were becoming more and more severe, and among civilians there was apathy everywhere. According to Lewis Einstein, the American Minister, the Germans were in some considerable anxiety that at the next blow the Turks might start negotiating in secret for a separate peace.