This work was pressed on with great haste, for there were many signs that the Allied attack would not be much longer delayed. Before the end of March Liman learned that four British officers had arrived in Piræus in Greece, and had there bought for cash forty-two large lighters and five tugs. The British apparently were not very successful in keeping watch on spies in Lemnos and the other Greek islands, for a stream of information about the Allies’ preparations kept reaching Constantinople by way of Egypt and Greece. General Hamilton’s arrival had been reported. It was known that a landing pier had been built in the harbour of Mudros, on Lemnos, and that stores and equipment were being unloaded there. Most of these reports came from the Balkans, but even as far off as Rome German agents were hearing rumours of the coming offensive, and these were duly relayed to the headquarters in Gallipoli. At one time it was said that 50,000 British soldiers had assembled on Imbros and Lemnos. Then the total was increased to 80,000 with 50,000 French in addition. Though confusing, all this intelligence pointed in the same direction: there was not much time left.
Each day, too, there was a good deal of enemy activity which Liman could see with his own eyes. Allied aircraft of a newer, faster pattern had begun to fly over the peninsula on reconnaissance. Like cruising sharks, grey, silent and sinister, the silhouettes of British warships kept ceaselessly moving back and forth far out to sea.
Then in the third week of April there occurred a sudden flurry of activity in the straits themselves.
Shortly after dawn on April 17 Turkish sentries at Kephez Point saw a submarine come to the surface. Apparently it was heading for the Narrows with the intention of passing through to the Sea of Marmara, but suddenly it was caught in a violent eddy and began to drift towards the shore. At once every Turkish gun in the neighbourhood was turned on to the helpless vessel, and as it touched the shore the crew came on deck and were swept into the sea by machine-gun fire. During the next two days and nights an erratic duel took place between the Turks and the British for the abandoned hulk. In turn British submarines, aircraft and warships came rushing into the straits in an attempt to destroy it before the Turks got possession, but their torpedoes went astray, the bombs fell wide, and the warships were driven off by the shore batteries. Finally on the third night a little British patrol boat came sailing straight into the glare of the searchlights and with a lucky shot got one of its torpedoes home.
According to Lewis Einstein, the American Minister in Constantinople, the Turks behaved very well over this incident. When the submarine was first abandoned and the British sailors were struggling in the water the Turkish soldiers on the shore jumped in and rescued them. The dead were first buried on the beach and then taken to the English cemetery at Chanak, where a service was said over them. ‘The Turks are extraordinary in this,’ Einstein wrote. ‘One moment they will murder wantonly, and the next surprise everyone by their kindness. Thus when the first English submarine prisoners were led into the hospital at Chanak, shivering in their wet clothes, the Turkish wounded called them guests, and insisted on their being given everything new, and such few delicacies as they possessed.’
It was only later when the prisoners were sent to filthy prisons in Constantinople that ill-treatment began, but even then in most cases it was the ill-treatment of indifference, of the squalor and callousness of the East rather than an act of deliberate revenge.
Meanwhile another warning had sounded on the Dardanelles. On April 19 a company of Turkish soldiers had made their camp in a fold of the hills on the western side of the peninsula. It was the usual early morning scene: the soldiers asleep on the ground, the smoke of the first cooking fires rising upwards and the lines of horses and mules tethered nearby. Then without warning the terrible searing rush of shells filled the sky and everything was in an uproar of cascading earth and bursting shrapnel. Some thought it was an earthquake and lay still in terror, others ran to the lines of screaming animals and tried to mount and get away, others again who kept their wits went to their guns. But they could see nothing on the flat and deserted sea, nothing but a tiny yellow balloon on the far horizon. It was not until after the campaign that the Turks learned that this was the Manica, the first of the British kite-balloon ships, trying out a new artillery spotting device. While the vessel still lay below the horizon out of sight from the land two observers had gone up in a wicker basket attached to the balloon at the end of a long vertiginous swaying cable, and, with the first light of the morning, had seen through their binoculars the peaceful encampment in the hills. It was an easy matter then for the encampment’s position to be fixed on the map and the news to be telephoned down to the Manica’s bridge below; and it was the shells of the cruiser Bacchante lying unseen still further out at sea that fell, so miraculously, out of the empty sky on to the sleeping Turks.
And then, a day or two later, a heavy British air-raid, the first of the campaign, fell on Maidos at the Narrows. Seven 100-lb. bombs, an unheard-of kind of missile in the Mediterranean at this time, set the town on fire.
After this there was silence again. No more ships attempted to enter the straits and no gun was fired on either side. The weather continued to be unsettled and cold. Among the Turks, who had now been given almost five weeks in which to prepare their defences, nothing remained to be done but to wait — to post their watchers on the hill tops and the cliffs, to keep gazing out to sea by day and sweeping the straits with their searchlights at night. The dread of the coming invasion was everywhere about them; but where it would fall, and at what hour of the day or night, and what it would look like when it came — of all this they had no notion at all.
CHAPTER SIX
‘A voice had become audible, a note had been struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth in arms engaged in this present war, than any other… The voice has been swiftly stilled.’
Winston Churchill in a letter to The Times, April 26, 1915.
THERE was a fever of excitement about the ‘Constantinople Expedition’ among young men in England. ‘It’s too wonderful for belief,’ Rupert Brooke wrote as he was setting out. ‘I had not imagined Fate could be so kind… Will Hero’s Tower crumble under the 15-inch guns? Will the sea be polyphloisbic and wine-dark and unvintageable? Shall I loot mosaics from St. Sophia, and Turkish Delight and carpets? Should we be a Turning Point in History? Oh God! I’ve never been quite so happy in my life I think. Never quite so pervasively happy; like a stream flowing entirely to one end. I suddenly realize that the ambition of my life has been — since I was two — to go on a military expedition against Constantinople.’
Rupert Brooke, with his romanticism, his eagerness and his extreme physical beauty, is the symbolic figure in the Gallipoli campaign. One feels that he was destined to be there, that among all these tens of thousands of young men this was the one who was perfectly fitted to express their exuberance, their secret devotion, their ‘half joy of life and half readiness to die’.[8]
He was just twenty-seven at this time, and the circumstances of his life were almost too good to be true. There had been his lyrical schooldays at Rugby, where he was liked by everybody and where he was in all the teams, and all the literary honours were his. Then Cambridge with the dabblings in socialism, the amateur theatricals, the sittings-up all night, the ramblings through the countryside talking of Oscar Wilde and singing all the way. Like T. E. Lawrence later on he had met and captivated almost everyone who counted in London, from the Asquiths and the Churchills to the Shaws and Henry James. He had travelled everywhere (though always at the end of a thread that tied him to England), and just before the war had been searching for lost Gauguins in Tahiti in the South Pacific. It was Churchill who had obtained for him his commission in the Royal Naval Division which had gone first to Antwerp and was now committed to Gallipoli. More than ever, on the eve of this new adventure, the poet was the hero of Mrs. Cornford’s poem: