‘The Turk,’ Aubrey Herbert wrote, ‘was unbusinesslike, placid, and lazy or easy-going. But when he turned in his rage he poured out death in a bucket, and guilty and innocent suffered in his blind anger.’
Before March there were about two million Armenians in Turkey, and it was the Young Turks’ intention to exterminate or deport them all. This task, however, was never completed; barely three-quarters of a million were dead or dying by the time the frantic rage of their tormentors had exhausted itself.
It would be absurd, of course, to argue that the Allies’ failure in the Dardanelles was the only cause of the Armenian massacre; the root instinct of the Turks to destroy this unprotected minority was always there. But March 18 offered them the opportunity, the massacre followed the victory, and the psychological effect on the Turks was immense. From this time onwards the soldiers felt that they were utterly committed; the traitors at home had been stamped out and now they were Moslems together in a common cause. There was no longer any question of surrender or defeat. It was the defiance of the wounded wolf. He had wreaked his vengeance on the weak and now he stood at bay against the world.
Thus before ever the land battle had begun there were decisive influences at work on the Gallipoli campaign, and perhaps in the long run they counted for more than armaments and strategy; March 18 had brought the Turks together, and the auto-da-fé of the Armenian massacres had added a certain desperation, the desperation which presumably the outlaw feels. And it was one more complication in this strange mental web that while the Turks were now quite determined to resist the coming invasion they did not really hate the British and the French — not at any rate in the intimate personal way in which they hated the Armenians and perhaps the Russians. It was opposition of a more dangerous kind. For the Turks the Allies were, quite simply, invaders from outer space, and they prepared to meet them as one prepares to face some tremendous natural upheaval like an earthquake or a hurricane at sea. In other words, they got ready to fight not with passion but simply to survive; they were Turks fighting for Turkey, Moslems against the infidel. The battle, as they saw it, was a straight clash of opposites, a trial of strength and skill which could only end in their own extermination or in victory. Such opponents are probably the most formidable of all — and especially so in this case because these things were not really understood in the Allied camp at the time.
The Turks were seriously underrated by the Allies. They had only been known in retreat and in battles outside their own country. They were expected to fight as they fought the Armenians, recklessly and viciously but not as disciplined soldiers who knew the science of modern war. It was even hoped in the War Office in London that once the Allied expeditionary forces were ashore at Gallipoli the enemy would turn tail and make for Constantinople. There might be moments of difficult guerrilla fighting, but it remained in effect for the British and the French a minor operation.
These were very serious delusions, for the Turks in fact were making the most sensible arrangements for the defence of their country. Directly the bombardment of March 18 was over Enver sent a message to Liman von Sanders saying he wanted to see him in his office. Arriving soon afterwards, he offered the Field Marshal the command of the forces at the Dardanelles.
It must have caused Enver some little heartburning to reach this decision, for his relations with Liman had been getting steadily worse from the moment when, three months before, the German general had derided his plans for the invasion of the Caucasus. To Enver, no doubt, this foreign technician was a solemn bore. In his capacity of Inspector-General of the Turkish Forces Liman had been a persistent nuisance; one day it was a complaint about the hospitals (they were in an appalling state, with spotted typhus spreading everywhere), and the next it was a demand for better food for the men, for rifles, for blankets, for uniforms. Enver at least had been able to settle the matter of the uniforms. Just a few soldiers in Constantinople were presentably equipped, and as soon as it was learned that Liman was about to make an inspection this squad was hurried to the spot with freshly polished boots and shining buttons. But Liman soon found out about this and complained again.
The real argument between the two men, however, had arisen over the disposal of the forces in the south. Enver, as commander-in-chief, had drawn a line through the Dardanelles and the Sea of Marmara, and had set up a command on either side, one in Asia, the other in Europe. This arrangement might have been sound enough at the time when Xerxes crossed from east to west in his advance on Europe, but to Liman’s mind it was precisely calculated to lead to the complete annihilation of the army as soon as an enemy attacked from the south. In short, the defences were placed exactly the wrong way round; the line should have been drawn east and west through the Sea of Marmara and all the forces to the south of it should have been prepared, under one command, to meet an invasion from the Mediterranean. When Liman advanced this view, Enver had replied calmly that he was wrong and the dispositions were going to stay as they were. By the end of February things had drifted towards an open breach, and Enver had even been intriguing for Liman’s recall to Germany.
But now in March when a renewal of the Allied attack on the Dardanelles was expected any minute, it was another matter. Something had to be done quickly about the fortification of Gallipoli.
Liman lost no time in taking up his new command. Having asked for and got the reinforcement of an extra division, he set off on March 25 for the peninsula — the very day on which Hamilton was sailing away from it to regroup his forces in Egypt. Liman’s departure indeed was so rapid that in many ways it resembled Hamilton’s hurried exit from London twelve days earlier; he waited neither for his staff nor his reinforcements, but took the first available boat and landed in Gallipoli town on the morning of March 26. There he set up his headquarters in the bare rooms of the French consular agent’s house and got to work.
The defence of the Gallipoli peninsula and the Dardanelles does not present any great mystery, at all events in its broader aspects. The peninsula juts out into the Ægean Sea for a distance of fifty-two miles, and it has a misshapen lozenge formation — very narrow at the neck, widening out to twelve miles in the centre, and then tapering off again to the tip at Cape Helles. The hills and the beaches are the important features, since an invading army presumably would first want to land, and then as quickly as possible get on to the heights whence it could dominate the Dardanelles. There were four beaches: at Bulair at the neck, at Suvla Bay half way down the peninsula, at Ari Burnu, still further south, and at the tip at Cape Helles. Behind all these landing places there was high ground — it almost formed a spine running down the centre of the peninsula — but the really important eminences were the Tekke Tepe ridge which made a semi-circle around Suvla Bay, the Sari Bair chain which rose to 1,000 feet just to the north of Ari Burnu, and Achi Baba, a rounded, gently-sloping hill 709 feet high, which was about six miles north of the Cape Helles beaches and dominated them entirely.
Similar beaches and hills existed on the eastern side of the peninsula along the Dardanelles, but it was hardly likely that an enemy would attempt a landing there, since he would come under fire from the Turkish guns in Asia, and so from Liman’s point of view they could be disregarded.
There remained the Asiatic side — the danger that the enemy might come ashore somewhere opposite the islands of Tenedos and Mytilene and make his way north across the plains of Troy towards the Narrows.
It was then, a question of guessing just where the invader was going to strike: at Bulair, where he could cut off the peninsula at the neck, at Suvla and Ari Burnu, half way down, where he could rapidly cross over to the Narrows, at Cape Helles, where his naval guns could dominate the land on three sides, or in Asia, where he had space to manœuvre: or at two or three or all these places?