Ashmead-Bartlett, who returned home from the peninsula for a few days about this time, gives a vivid picture of Churchill and his state of mind. ‘I am much surprised,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘at the change in Winston Churchill. He looks years older, his face is pale, he seems very depressed and to feel keenly his retirement from the Admiralty… At dinner the conversation was more or less general, nothing was said about the Dardanelles, and Winston was very quiet. It was only towards the very end that he suddenly burst forth into a tremendous discourse on the Expedition and what might have been, addressed directly across the table in the form of a lecture to his mother, who listened most attentively. Winston seemed unconscious of the limited number of his audience, and continued quite heedless of those around him. He insisted over and over again that the battle of March 18th had never been fought to a finish, and, had it been, the Fleet must have got through the Narrows. This is the great obsession of his mind, and will ever remain so… ’
Of these events little or nothing was known at Gallipoli. From day to day Hamilton waited for an answer to his message to Kitchener asking for the reinforcement of another Army corps. But nothing came beyond a promise of one Lowland division which was to sail from England. There was, however, an echo of the hesitation and the confusion in Whitehall in a cable which Hamilton received from Kitchener on May 19. In it Kitchener spoke of his disappointment at the progress at Gallipoli. ‘A serious situation,’ he said, ‘is created by the present check, and the calls for large reinforcements and an additional amount of ammunition that we can ill spare from France.
‘From the standpoint of an early solution of our difficulties, your views, as stated, are not encouraging. The question whether we can long support two fields of operation draining on our resources requires grave consideration. I know that I can rely on you to do your utmost to bring the present unfortunate state of affairs in the Dardanelles to as early a conclusion as possible, so that any consideration of a withdrawal, with all its dangers in the East, may be prevented from entering the field of possible solutions.
‘When all the above is taken into consideration, I am somewhat surprised to see that the 4,500 which Maxwell can send you are apparently not required by you. With the aid of these I had hoped that you would have been in a position to press forward.’
Hamilton wrote in his diary: ‘I can only surmise that my request made to Maxwell that these 4,500 men should come to me as drafts for my skeleton units, instead of as a raw brigade, has twisted itself going down some official corridor into a story that I don’t want the men! K. tells me Egypt is mine and the fatness thereof; yet no sooner do I make the most modest suggestion concerning anything or anyone Egyptian than K. is got at and I find he is the Barmecide and I Schac’abac.[16] “How do you like your lentil soup?” says K. “Excellently well,” say I, “but devil a drop is in the plate!” I have got to enter the joke; that’s the long and short of it.”
There is a revealing quality about this grotesque little incident, for it was symptomatic of the general tug-of-war in which they were all engaged: Maxwell withholding troops from Hamilton, Fisher withholding ships from Churchill, the Conservatives withholding political support from Asquith. The setback at Gallipoli, in short, had brought out into the open, and more bitterly than ever, the great issue which in the end was to dominate all others before the end of the year: were they to fight in the East or the West?
Meanwhile on the peninsula the Army’s store of ammunition had fallen so low that the guns were rationed to two shells a day. On the two fronts at Anzac and Cape Helles there was desultory fighting from time to time, but hardly more than a few yards of ground changed hands, and it seemed now that nothing could break the deadlock. Yet the situation could not remain as it was, some sort of decision would have to be taken. And, in fact, at this ultimate moment of hesitation, a glimpse of reality was on its way. A few moments before dawn, on this same day, May 19, General Birdwood was woken in his dugout at Anzac with the news that, in a packed mass of many thousands, the Turks were streaming across to his trenches in the darkness.
CHAPTER NINE
THERE is some dispute as to who ordered the attack on the Anzac bridgehead on the night of May 18. Liman von Sanders says that he himself made the plan and he takes the responsibility for it; others believe that it was conceived by Enver when he first visited the peninsula on May 10, and the circumstances of the enterprise do, in fact, bear the impress of Enver’s headlong cast of mind. There was no subtlety or caution about the matter: some 42,000 men under the command of Essad Pasha were assembled, and their orders were nothing less than to demolish the whole Anzac bridgehead at a single blow. By nightfall it was hoped that the last Dominion soldier would have been killed, captured or driven into the sea, and that the entire Turkish army would have then been free to turn south to deal with the remainder of Hamilton’s forces at Cape Helles.
At this time the Australian and New Zealand Corps had dwindled to some 10,000 effective men, and it was only by luck that a brigade which had been sent round to Cape Helles earlier in the month was returned to Birdwood on the eve of the battle. This brought his numbers to a total of about 17,000, of which 12,500 were available for fighting in the front line. They were thus outnumbered by more than three to one.
The Anzac position had by now become very clearly defined: it was a shallow triangle, covering about 400 acres, its base, a mile and a half long, resting on the sea, its apex reaching to the slopes of Sari Bair about a thousand yards from the shore. In order to avoid the fire of the British Fleet the Turks had dug their trenches almost on top of the Anzac lines, and at some places the two sides were divided by not more than ten yards. The situation at Quinn’s and Courtnay’s Posts in the centre of the line was fantastic; directly behind the Australian trench (which was kept packed with men by day and night), a steep cliff fell away to the gully below, and the Turks had only to make an advance of five yards in order to drive a wedge through the bridgehead to the sea. But this they never could succeed in doing, though they attacked repeatedly during the first half of May. No-man’s-land at these and other points was no larger than a small room, and it was the easiest thing in the world for the Turks to toss a hand grenade into the Anzac trenches. The only real defence against this was to throw the grenade smartly back again before it exploded; except for a few jam tins which were filled with explosive at a makeshift workshop on the beach, the Australians had no such weapons of their own. No man could expose the smallest fraction of his body for an instant without being shot, and even a periscope hoisted for a moment above the parapet was immediately shattered. An extreme tension prevailed in the bridgehead; there was no hour when some new raid was not expected or delivered, no minute when shells were not crashing among them or bullets screaming overhead. The soldiers managed to sleep through this racket at odd hours of the day and night, but it was never a sufficient rest. No one was ever safe. On May 14 General Bridges, the commander of the Australian Division, was mortally wounded, and the following day Birdwood had his hair parted by a bullet while he was looking through a periscope. The wound turned septic and was very painful but he continued in command.
16
A reference to the