There is a theme running through this life, and that is Lord Kitchener. Kitchener was Hamilton’s star. Fifteen years before Hamilton had served as the Field Marshal’s chief-of-staff in South Africa, and the intimacy that had grown up between them was a good deal more than the relationship of the admiring junior to his chief; there was a strength in Kitchener, a massiveness, which appears to have deeply satisfied something which was wanting in Hamilton’s own life. He was quite shrewd enough to see Kitchener’s weaknesses, and in his diaries he occasionally permitted himself to fret about them as a woman will fret about her husband. But Kitchener had only to speak out and Hamilton dissolved at once. Old K. In the end he was bigger than them all. One had to protect him from the fools and the critics. Never for an instant does Hamilton challenge his chief’s authority. Never does he fail to pause before taking a major decision and ask himself, ‘What would K. have done?’ And Kitchener on his side promotes his follower, occasionally favours him with his confidence, and now sends him off to Constantinople.
Henry Nevinson, the war correspondent, has an interesting note on Hamilton’s character: ‘From a mingled Highland and Scottish descent he had inherited the so-called Celtic qualities which are regarded by thorough Englishmen with varying admiration and dislike. His blood gave him so conspicuous a physical courage that after the battles of Caesar’s Camp and Diamond Hill the present writer, who knew him there, regarded him as an example of the rare type which not merely conceals fear with success, but does not feel it. Undoubtedly he was deeply tinged with the “Celtic charm”—that glamour of mind and courtesy of behaviour which create suspicion among people endowed with neither.’
After the war Hamilton was criticized for being so much under Kitchener’s thumb, for being a weak commander, a commentator on battles instead of a man of action. But it is only fair to remember that he was respected and liked by Winston Churchill and a great many other demanding people in London. At Gallipoli none of his senior contemporaries speak against him — not Keyes nor any of the Admirals, not any of the French. The one man who attacks him is a corps commander whom Hamilton dismissed. Under Hamilton’s command there is never any dispute between the Army and the Navy, and all the Allied contingents serve with him the utmost loyalty.
This in itself was something of an achievement, for the force that was now assembling itself in Egypt was a very mixed bag indeed. There were the French, a splendid sight on the parade ground, their officers in black and gold, the men in blue breeches and red coats. There were Zouaves and Foreign Legionaries from Africa, Sikhs and Gurkhas from India, and the labour battalions of Levantine Jews and Greeks. There were the sailors of the British and French Navies. There were the Scottish, English and Irish troops. And finally there were the New Zealanders and the Australians.
These last were an unknown quantity. They were all volunteers, they were paid more money than any of the other soldiers, and they exhibited a spirit which was quite unlike anything which had been seen on a European battlefield before. A strange change had overtaken this transplanted British blood. Barely a hundred years before their ancestors had gone out to the other side of the world from the depressed areas of the United Kingdom, many of them dark, small, hungry men. Their sons who had now returned to fight in their country’s first foreign war had grown six inches in height, their faces were thin and leathery, their limbs immensely lithe and strong. Their voices too had developed a harsh cockney accent of their own, and their command of the more elementary oaths and blasphemies, even judged by the most liberal army standards, was appalling. Such military forms as the salute did not come very easily to these men, especially in the presence of British officers, whom they regarded as effete, and their own officers at times appeared to have very little control over them. Each evening in thousands the Australians and New Zealanders came riding into Cairo from their camp near the pyramids for a few hours’ spree in the less respectable streets, riding on the tops of trams, urging their hired cabs and donkeys along the road — and the city shuddered a little.
This independent spirit was a promising thing in its own way, but for Birdwood, the British officer who was put in command of the Anzac[9] corps, there was a problem here which could not be easily solved. The men were nearly all civilians, and who could say how they would behave when they came under enemy fire for the first time? A period of intensive training began, but there was not much time.
Indeed, there was very little time for any of the matters which Hamilton had to attend to if he was to honour his undertaking that the attack would be launched by the middle of April. He did not reach Alexandria until the afternoon of March 26, and this meant he had barely three weeks in hand. The job that lay before the General was, in effect, nothing less than the setting up of the largest amphibious operation in the whole history of warfare. No similar exploit in the past bore any real comparison: in 1588 the Spanish Armada never did succeed in landing its men on England; neither Napoleon in Egypt in 1799 nor the British and the French in the Crimea in 1854 had had to face such entrenched positions as Liman von Sanders was now establishing at Gallipoli. In fact the only operation that could be compared with this lay thirty years ahead on the beaches of Normandy in the second world war; and the planning of the Normandy landing was to take not three weeks but nearly two years.
Hamilton’s mind went back to classical times. ‘The landing of an army upon the theatre of operations I have described,’ he wrote in one of his despatches, ‘—a theatre strongly garrisoned throughout and prepared for any such attempt — involved difficulties for which no precedent was forthcoming in military history, except possibly in the sinister legends of Xerxes.’
There were some 75,000 men at the General’s disposaclass="underline" 30,000 Australians and New Zealanders divided into two divisions, the 29th British Division of 17,000 men, one French division of 16,000, and the Royal Naval Division of 10,000. All these forces, together with 1,600 horses, donkeys and mules and 300 vehicles, had to be so assembled on board the ships that they would be able to land together on the enemy coast under the direct fire of the Turkish guns.
It is a matter of some surprise that the expedition ever got to sea at all. On March 26 Hamilton’s administrative staff had still not arrived from England (it did not get to Alexandria until April 11), many of the soldiers were still at sea, no accurate maps existed, there was no reliable information about the enemy, no plan had been made, and no one had yet decided where the Army was to be put ashore.
The simplest of questions were unanswered. Was there water on the shore or not? What roads existed? What casualties were to be expected and how were the wounded men to be got off to the hospital ships? Were they to fight in trenches or in the open, and what sort of weapons were required? What was the depth of water off the beaches and what sort of boats were needed to get the men, the guns and the stores ashore? Would the Turks resist or would they break as they had done at Sarikamish; and if so how were the Allies to pursue them without transport or supplies?
It was perhaps the very confusion of this situation which made it possible for the staff to get things done. Since no one could really calculate what the difficulties were going to be it was simply a matter of taking the material that came to hand, and of hoping for the best. A period of hectic improvisation began. Men were sent into the bazaars of Alexandria and Cairo to buy skins, oildrums, kerosene tins — anything that would hold water. Others bought tugs and lighters on the docks; others again rounded up donkeys and their native drivers and put them into the Army. There were no periscopes (for trench fighting), no hand grenades and trench-mortars; ordinance workshops set to work to design and make them. In the absence of maps staff officers scoured the shops for guide-books.
9
ANZAC: Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. The word bears an unfortunate resemblance to the Turkish ‘ANSAC’ which means ‘almost’.